Hmmm, a common theme, but if you contacted VM about this, it is not classed as evidence. They say, its a problem with TBB and how they monitor. amusing that we both had the same "lump" and we go through the same exchange, my friends didnt have that same lump from what i can tell. He goes thru another exchange.

Can we get a TBB staff member to clarify if the double red spikes or the "lump" we talk of are Monitor side or ISP side, this could strengthen my argument that promising me "double" speeds is not good, i want a consistent service not a peak time unusable connection.

Raw speed means nothing if you can only download with it, as a gamer i need stability, and with the rest of my house being avid video streamers, they need the speed so they can all stream their programs.

VirginMedia, should be in the oxford English dictionary with the definition being, Unstable, Unreliable, Untrustworthy, Deceptive. You can speak to 2 different people on the same day within an hour and get 2 different stories. You can call to report a problem and be told they know of the problem and to wait a few days, this is a ploy they use to allow for excessive usage to drop off a little. I gave a JOB number to the CEO and he told me in a reply no such job existed in this area, and was infact a JOB in a London exchange. The most amusing thing is that there is 2 green street cabinets (UBR as they call them) within a quarter mile of my house one less than 200 feet away. Most of my bad lag comes when my ping to the end of my street is higher than my ping to the east coast of Australia, which i find confusing. The days where i get bad response in the UK like Birmingham(12 miles away) gives me a ping of 250ms, yet EAST COAST US gets me 149ms. Totally pathetic system they run.

http://craigswebsites.co.uk/ping/ a selection of VM monitors, and at bottom of page Other links so you can see what is unique to Virgin Media i.e. rule out problem on our end

A Sky graph notice how there is not the red that seems to affect most VM customers My Broadband Ping

That shows it was not our ping box.

Another on different ISP
My Broadband Ping

O2/Be, BT, TalkTalk graphs all look normal.

All Virgin Media graphs appear to have a red bar at 1am and 1.15am, suggesting a peering link went off line or was switched around

Edited by MrSaffron (Tue 13-Nov-12 20:21:18)

Looking at 95% of the end user graphs that are not virgin, seem much better on average. There are some spikes, but they probably link to downloading or uploading. Where as VirginMedia 95% of graphs ive seen show this constantly fluctuating ping always with a reasonably thick yellow average ping band, most other "fiber" products have none or extremely thin intermittent average yellow bands.

Thank you MrSaffron for giving us that link.

May i ask another question, you dont have to answer i know you are an impartial broadband news and info site.

Basically do you think i would be able to use such result graphs as evidence that their network is basically terribly over saturated. Would i be able to negate their nonsense "KPI" rubbish that they always spout, the fact that no other products that are seen in these graphs show anything near similar?

I do understand that the other products are not the same as Virgin Media Fiber BB, but surely this is evidence that their system is broken or at a minimum needs to be seriously overhauled.

VIrgin by nature of the cable network has more jitter (yellow area) so only if the blue and green or packet loss are bad is there really an issue.

I am from the Ashford, Kent area. I took a trace of bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to bbc.co.uk [212.58.241.131]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 15 ms 16 ms 11 ms cpc18-asfd3-2-0-gw.1-2.cable.virginmedia.com [82
.27.123.1]
2 12 ms 7 ms 7 ms asfd-core-1a-ge-114-1752.network.virginmedia.net
[80.3.98.145]
3 16 ms 11 ms 14 ms popl-bb-1a-xe-603-0.network.virginmedia.net [212
.43.163.30]
4 15 ms 38 ms 22 ms nrth-bb-1b-as3-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.10
5.172.13]
5 18 ms 15 ms 23 ms tele-ic-4-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.
174.18]
6 19 ms 23 ms 27 ms pos6-1.rt0.thdo.bbc.co.uk [212.58.239.237]
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 14 ms 25 ms 15 ms ae1.er01.rbsov.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.46]
9 24 ms 15 ms 12 ms 132.185.255.60
10 15 ms 16 ms 14 ms 212.58.241.131

Trace complete.

I have a continuous ping to bbc.co.uk at the moment but I do tend to find that tues-thursday it rarely happens. A snap shot of this

Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=29ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=39ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=35ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=245
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=245


I've been purposely on Warcraft tonight all night its been fine which has I said is typical. If I look over my BBQM on a weekly basis, those red spikes tend to be Friday-Monday.

I think If I am not going to get anywhere with VM with this, I will have to have a serious thought on where to go, it cant stay like this.

That route suggest virgin has a direct peer with the BBC, what you need to do is look at the routes for things like WoW and where its servers are

In reply to a post by JonasTone:

Hmmm, a common theme, but if you contacted VM about this, it is not classed as evidence. They say, its a problem with TBB and how they monitor. amusing that we both had the same "lump" and we go through the same exchange, my friends didnt have that same lump from what i can tell. He goes thru another exchange.

Oh they come up with all sorts of claims as to why you're having problems, doing their level best to shift the blame. Having known a couple of people who worked for them, some of it is ignorance. Not in a malicious way, just in that the people answering the phones simply do not have the technical background to understand the problems, and are given a checklist sheet of questions to ask that's as formulaeic as they come. Some of it is intentional though, even now a lot of people are not computer savvy and they do their best to palm off problems so people don't decide to switch.

They can claim anything they want about that pattern of red spikes, I know (as I was browsing) that it was them and not this monitoring site because I could not reach websites during those spikes. TBB didn't cause that. My router and/or modem didn't cause that, otherwise it wouldn't be the exact same spikes on other peoples graphs. That's them pure and simple, regardless of what exactly caused it.

Thanks, I'll set some pings off to some servers, mumble, wow, BF3 etc tonight.


Why do I get the feeling that I will be shifting providers before this is fixed...

Here's a typical Sky one with 6 users. I have Fibre service

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/e12f5038102...

I always had a much much experience in terms of packet loss etc with VM.