BQM

Sorry but very new to this forum.

Have Virgin 60mb broadband. Ths has been fine until recently when we have started having problems with buffering on viwing video (wired connection) and drop outs on wireless connections. I have Virgen Superhub set up as modem only and my Apple Airport Extreme handles both the LAN and WAN.

I have BQM graph and frankly I don't really know what I am looking at, other than I think it is showing a latency issue at peak times and I am wondering if this is what is causing my problems. Is it possible/allowed for me to post a copy of the graph on this forum and ask for some input from other forum members?

Your help would be appreciated - I really want to try and work out what the issues might be before trying to contact Virgin!

Cheers

In reply to a post by lancerc:

Is it possible/allowed for me to post a copy of the graph on this forum and ask for some input from other forum members?

Yes, of course- use the Share Snapshot Graph option and select the Text Link - BBCode (for forums; including thinkbroadband forums) version of the links that are generated.

Just copy/paste it into your post- it will continue to update itself until midnight then stop.

Thank you. Not sure if I have done this correctly - seems an awful lot of yellow!

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/b10c8a18ced...

A fairly classic example of a Virgin Media connection where congestion starts at around 4pm

The green is OK (~13-14mS ping?), but as you say, rather a lot of yellow. It's a fairly typical indication of a connection that's congested somewhere, and the timings of where it gets worse would support that.

Unfortunately, nor is it untypical of a BQM with Virgin... here's a couple of posts I found in the Virgin cable forum here with links to other BQMs:

Slightly better one

Rather worse one

At least yours doesn't show any red!

Thank you for your time. So it seems this is a Virgin issue which is rather what I feared. What to do next is another thing altogether!

Just one last question. Would the issues shown on my graph lead you to expect dropped wireless connections, problems streaming movies etc. The annoying thing is everything seemed to be working fine until a few weeks ago in fact this may go back to when they doubled the speed from 30mb to 60mb.

Thanks again.

Dropped wireless - a sympton perhaps of the superhub which many people prefer to use as a pure modem

The speed change means a change of network on the VM side.

Highly variable pings as a sign of congestion mean that jitter may be making streaming video packets arrive out of order, or be delayed or not enough bandwidth to deliver enough to support the bitrate. though usually you see a fair bit of red packet loss when it gets than bad

Thank you. The superhub is already set up as a modem.

The dropped wireless sounds more like something local... a failing router is obviously one possibility, but it could be something like a new source of interference somewhere.

Maybe a neighbour with a new internet connection whose router has selected the same channel as yours? Worth having a look around with something like inSSIDer.