BQM newbie - what do huge wide bars of yellow mean on Virgin

Hi there, having struggled with my Virgin M100 internet for many months, and just got a big price increase to match... I decided to actually properly investigate things, and found this very useful site (thanks).

Yesterday speedtest was showing me 80+mb/s download but just 0.6upload which would explain me not being able to participate in any meetings and be heard/seen.


So then I hooked up BQM, and in the process saw that my Virgin V2 hub was no longer in modem mode (so that somewhat explained 6+ months of worse reliability, and possibly more). Having fixed that and enabled echo requests, I started getting some results - here:
My Broadband Ping

I can see an initial red line for packet loss which matched my experience all yesterday (prior to me monitoring unfortunately) and then having sorted true modem mode it seemed to improve things before I went to bed (although could be just coincidence). In the morning however - I now see large swathes of yellow bars - with the graph almost mostly yellow - and I am wondering if this is virgin network congestion? At first I though maybe it was my family overusing things on our end - but after the morning school lessons and no-one doing much, its still mostly yellow.

Am i interpreting this properly? Is there anything I can do - or do I need to complain to Virgin, and definitely not incur the 1/3 price increase.

Any tips gratefully appreciated.

In my area - West London - Chiswick, would BT be any better (lower speed - max quotes is 50-67mb - but 17 upload), or is a saturated Virgin line the best I'm going to be able to get?

Tim

Almost certainly congestion ... can you do anything? probably not except change provider.

Some useful information on interpretation: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/faq/broadband-quality... scroll right don to teh graph image.

In reply to a post by 365nice:

Any tips gratefully appreciated.

If you don't have a Hub 3 router, then upgrade, but most likely you need to complain to Virgin and get a discount, keep complaining until they fix it.

Maybe an Openreach based provider as you quote (not just BT Internet there are others); but also ask around to see if any of the alternate networks are in your area.

With regards to Hub3 router - is that better than a Hub2 router which I have (but its in modem mode and a tpLink Deco-M5 attached - for which i've been suitable impressed).

I thought I read that many people actually down grade to the Hub2 (at least when it first came out).

If it makes a big difference, then I should complain about that.

Tim

The Hub 3 can handle the full level of DOCSIS channels compared to the older Hub 2. However the Hub 3 contains the Intel Puma chipset which originally had major problems with latency and major complaints from gamers. The faster speeds (350 or higher) probably need the Hub 3. The Gig1 service needs the new Hub 4.

If your area is oversubscribed you MIGHT get some relief with more channel support in the Hub 3. The Hub 3 supports modem mode.

Best place to ask is on the Virgin Community as the staff on that forum can check your account and channel details, and let you know if its worth asking for an upgrade.

As a related question - would my M100 package be at all improved by an M200 package - given such congestion, does my limited rate have any bearing - or would I simply be paying extra for capacity that simply isn't there?

Equally, is it all possible that my hub is tuned incorrectly? I see lots of messages on the Virgin forum where they look at all kinds of stats and say to get something adjusted - would these "tunings" affect the BQM graph - or is it literally measuring at a lower level at which these things don't have much bearing?

Tim

The latency issue (yellow lines in the BQM) is pretty much a given on the hybrid-fibre-coax (HFC) Virgin Media network. If you are in a relatively new build VM area you may have fibre to the house with a coax adaptor, these areas have much cleaner graphs.

No upgrading from 100 to 200 I don’t think will make a difference. My understanding (and you should check on the VM community) is that there are multiple channels (e.g. old style analogue cable TV channels) used to transfer internet data. Your Hub 2 can only see X number of channels, whereas a Hub 3 can see more. In your area there are a lot of people using VM and so the channels are pretty full, so if you have more channels there is more chance of enough gaps in the traffic so your 100 Mbps fits in the gaps. ( I think of it as a seriously busy road in California with 100’s of lanes!).

The tuning is something the community can check, but when my signal levels were low, I lost connection totally (red lines on BQM) rather than slow speeds. They are not anything you can chance, they need Virgin Media to check the numbers, and sometimes send an engineer out to your street.

This is great information - I really appreciate it (as well as whoever wrote BQM and its visualisation - thats pretty awesome)