BQM interpretation query

Hello, I am having some issues with my broadband reliability (virgin media) having constant dropouts, particularly when streaming radio stations/ can somebody help me interpret the attached chart (by and large an idle connection most of the time?

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...


Are those yellow spikes normal, or at the origin of the issue. What can I tell VM?

Hi, and welcome to the forums.

I'm no expert on VM, but there is a lot of discussion on here of the BQMs for their connections. Yours looks remarkably good for VM, so the problem looks to be elsewhere rather than the connection itself. Perhaps between your device and the VM router.

The yellow basically indicates that some traffic instigated by you is going on, with the return from the BQM ping being delayed for varying amounts while the router does its primary job, handling your data transfers. Pings and responses are bottom of the priority pile for all data transmissions. The steady green and blue are normal as long as they are normally at some steady level like yours.

That said, a connection drop on xDSLx rather than VM "cable" is always obvious from red spikes dropping from the top, usually right to the bottom and wider than your yellow ones.

I might be a good idea, rather than post a full single day link, to put the "Live" link in your signature in your Main Site profile. That let's everyone automatically able to see what is happening before and after your post if you make it when the problem is happening .

That's about all I can help with, sorry. The VM experts will be around before long, but Sunday night is often occupied doing other things. Particularly the day before further Covid restrictions are due to be announced . As Boris put it, becoming more and more "convivial" in pubs and restaurants before 10pm.

You have no packet loss (that would be in red). The yellow spikes are times of higher latency, very normal on the Cable network that Virgin Media use. Yours is better than many others. If those spikes are when you are using the connection, then even better.

If you are losing connection, then the BQM isn’t showing this, so you need to look at the Network Log on the virgin Hub. This may contain some more clues as to what the problem is.

Are you using WiFi or Ethernet to the Hub ?


Cable uses the DOCSIS technology, which is different to the ADSL or VDSL (“fibre to the cabinet”) services. My live BQM is in my signature, I’m on Virgin Cable 200 Mbps, and the red break is when my service failed for a good 50mins. (I have an engineer booked).

Edited by jchamier (Sun 11-Oct-20 22:56:08)