How accurate is the BQM

Hello this is my 1st post here but been using the site for a long time doing BQM’s as asked by virgin media forum team because I’ve been experiencing rubber banding in games for months now and had several engineers out and raised many complaints. I’ve even got my neighbours doing BQM ‘s also who are on virgin and there graphs show same issues as mine and 2 of them connect to a different cabinet to me. So today some main engineer was sent from complaints and I showed him the graphs and his reply was how do we know if these BQM are accurate and if they work well? My argument is everytime I have issues it’s in perfect timing with what the graphs show but virgin are saying they can’t see any issues. One moment they say high utilisation then they say no problems, it’s getting frustrating ad 4-5 days out of every 7 mine and neighbours graphs are all over the place, more so after 6pm till 1am then can be fine for a couple of days with just lots of yellow spikes then boom lots of blue and yellow peaks and impossible gaming. So just wondering if the graphs are accurate and is there anyway to see if it’s high utilisation or noise on the line as I’m not sure what the BQM is exactly telling me. Thanks for any help in advance I’m so bored of virgin media been so unhelpful and saying this sites BQM isn’t accurate just because they can’t see any issue on my line to the cab even though I’ve sent them all bqm’s from 3 different houses connected to 2 different cabinets one at top of the street one is the main cab at bottom of the road. Thanks

The graphs accurately measure what they are designed to measure.

We know that the TBB servers themselves are not the issue as other ISPs do not see these problems in graphs. We know the Internet link from TBB is not the issue, again because other ISP graphs are fine. What we don't know is what route they take through the Internet to hit VM network - however, given the graphs we normally see from Virgin it is highly likely that it is congestion in the local VM network near you. This is not uncommon and equally it is not uncommon for VM to blame TBB.

What would be interesting would be if VM have some core test servers that you can setup a ping to. This would show if the spikes are between you and the core VM network (ie probably a local congestion issue) or if it is between the core VM network and TBB (which could be either VMs core network being contested or potentially the peering they are using).

What is almost definite though is that the problem is either with VM or their peering links rather than with TBB or no-one on TBB would get low pings and yet many many people get low consistent pings on other ISPs.

You can also compare with other VM users, I'm on M200 in the Surrey/Hants area, and my live BQM is below. If you post a link to yours others may have suggestions.

VM is good for fast downloads, but not great for low ping, due to the design of DOCSIS cable technology. Some gamers may have a VM connection for downloading the many gigabyte updates, and an ADSL or VDSL/FTTC connection that provides lower latency for multi-player gaming. (Costs more money though).

Edited by jchamier (Mon 13-Jun-22 10:33:29)

Thankyou very much for your awesome advice and help. Here is my live graph My Broadband Ping

Also here is a graph of what I’ve been dealing with at its worse, any help would be great ful as virgin just keep saying there’s no issues they can see
My Broadband Ping

Edited by purebliss (Mon 13-Jun-22 20:03:51)

It would be interesting to see what ping results you get by pinging the Virgin Media website.

When things are looking relatively ok on the BQM go to a command prompt and do :
ping virginmedia.com

Take a screenshot of the results. Then, when the BQM is looking bad do the same thing again. Take a screenshot.

If the ping results are significantly higher when pinging their website at a bad time than at a good time then it would seem to be pretty good evidence that it isn't TBB that is at fault. Would love to see how Virgin would argue it isn't them if you are pinging a Virgin web site from a Virgin connection (of course it might all be fine as they may have specific routes to their web site that avoid congestion but it also might be the silver bullet to get them to accept an issue).

The default number of pings on the command I have suggested will ping 4 times. If you want to ping it for longer then do:
ping virginmedia.com -t

That will keep on pinging the site until you do a ctrl-c or close the window. Or you could do :
ping virginmedia.com -n 20

That would ping the site 20 times to give more pings but avoiding having to ctrl-c out of it.

Your live graph looks pretty typical for a Virgin Media cable connection in the UK. Cable uses a technology called DOCSIS (stands for Data Over Cable Service Interface Spec) and is very different to the technology used by other broadband providers, the old ADSL, the newer FTTC / VDSL and the latest "full fibre" which is FTTP.

If you are a gamer whom needs "low ping" then Virgin may not be the right ISP for you, however if you need fast downloads of the latest very large games and patches, they are often the only super high speed provider in an area (unless you have an FTTP provider in your town).

To understand your 31st May picture we would need to know if you were using the connection heavily at this time. If you were, this may be normal.

As these are really Virgin Media questions, rather than BQM questions, you will get more people whom know about Virgin's network in the Virgin Media sub forum:
https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/virgin_cable.html

thankyou again for the replies and help, ive had virgin out again as they just turned up on sunday sent from complaints, the engineer says he thinks its something at the main node or on the rack? ive been up and down on the virgin forum people jumping on my post saying its high utilisation but then virgin say its not one minute then it is. the graph i showed from the 31st is a day where no one was on the internet, most that my net gets used for is gaming from 9pm till 12am other than that just some browsing on ipad. compared to the graph i was shown in the post above and other graphs my friends have setup who are virgin mine is horrible. its usually worst from 6pm but weekends it can be bad from 7am till 1am. i just thought virgin would be able to find out 100 percent whats going on if its noise or congestion, there 2nd line support network team says its at 65percent and no congestion that would cause the rubber banding im getting on games and they then go back to saying we dont know how accurate tbb sites bqm monitoring is.