Virgin high jitter / instability, WFH, considering 2nd line

Hi - Virgin have been good until they upgraded everyone to 200 mb/s. Since that time I've ended up with high Jitter and cases where the router drops completely with a 5 minute reboot outage. I spend a lot of the time using Citrix to work / or Zoom calls, so low Jitter and a good backbone is important. I am pretty sure Virgin have over sold their backbone and not been managing capacity properly. My friend has Plusnet in the local area and gets a Jitter reading of 0-1 ms compared with my consistent 3ms on Virgin Media. I do wonder if this is reflective of a congested network.

And so I am thinking of a second connection.. I've read the forums a fair bit. The go-to seems to be Zen for this use case, but I am minded to go with BT for the service aspect - I increasingly need a connection that has office like reliability due to this terrible Covid situation.

Some charts for what I experience on Virgin right now - they have told me of a fix date in the past but issues persist.

I would likely take out a second line for now, then plan to ditch Virgin once I am out of contract or they get their act together.

It is possible I retain a second line longer term - if anyone has any recommendations of routers that can load balance over 2 internet connections, that is also appreciated.

Drops:

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

Latency Spikes:

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

Thanks in advance!

3 ms of jitter is normal on Virgin Media and every other cable company using standard DoCSIS 3.0.

The massive spikes are not and look like a capacity issue.

The dropouts are not and look like another issue is present on top of the capacity issue. That issue may actually contribute to the capacity issue - if it's a signal to noise issue it'll chop some off the upstream capacity and in turn exacerbate any issues there.

In reply to a post by samuel987:

Hi - Virgin have been good until they upgraded everyone to 200 mb/s. Since that time I've ended up with high Jitter and cases where the router drops completely with a 5 minute reboot outage.

The drops could be a local fault in the wiring in the street. Made worse by higher temperatures in summer. Ensure you raise tickets and get it looked at. The community forum is quite good, and you can post the logs from your Hub, which will show the problem.

Edited by jchamier (Wed 29-Jul-20 10:38:02)

Thank you - i've reported it on the forum also, waiting for someone to get back to me. The local VM cabinet is a joke - it's well vented to say the least! VM have taken 6 months to not replace the missing door on the cabinet. A link below to the image below. Their lack of care about their own assets is shocking really. This is despite formal complaints getting raised.

A local neighbour replaced the tyre with some cable ties to hold the plastic shield in place, to prevent the cables from overflowing onto the street.

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/image/serverpag...

In reply to a post by samuel987:

Thank you - i've reported it on the forum also, waiting for someone to get back to me. The local VM cabinet is a joke - it's well vented to say the least! VM have taken 6 months to not replace the missing door on the cabinet. A link below to the image below. Their lack of care about their own assets is shocking really. This is despite formal complaints getting raised.

We don't have anything as bad as that here (yet) but much of the street equipment will now be 30 years old (installed circa 1990) and even those that have closed doors are corroding.

I had a repair at the start of July, everything had been good until the high temperatures arrived, then I was getting regularly disconnected.

The guy who turned up had to spend a good 40 minutes in the cabinet and he moved my connection to a different port, this was "less corroded". He didn't tell me if the whole cabinet is starting to go.

Competition is a good thing generally, but if VM doesn't get enough subscribers in an area to keep the infrastructure going, they will end up with NO subscribers, when Openreach FTTP arrives.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by samuel987:

Thank you - i've reported it on the forum also, waiting for someone to get back to me. The local VM cabinet is a joke - it's well vented to say the least! VM have taken 6 months to not replace the missing door on the cabinet. A link below to the image below. Their lack of care about their own assets is shocking really. This is despite formal complaints getting raised.

We don't have anything as bad as that here (yet) but much of the street equipment will now be 30 years old (installed circa 1990) and even those that have closed doors are corroding.

I had a repair at the start of July, everything had been good until the high temperatures arrived, then I was getting regularly disconnected.

The guy who turned up had to spend a good 40 minutes in the cabinet and he moved my connection to a different port, this was "less corroded". He didn't tell me if the whole cabinet is starting to go.

Competition is a good thing generally, but if VM doesn't get enough subscribers in an area to keep the infrastructure going, they will end up with NO subscribers, when Openreach FTTP arrives.

Around here the cabinets are rammed full with customer connections that the doors have to be forced shut however they just don't seem to give a scooby doo when it comes to sorting the cabinets out.

To be fair it's usually the contractors leaving the doors open. The reason for this is often they don't give them the keys so they force the doors open, result is then that the metal door, locks just don't work well then. Or that person A who has the key opens door earlier in day, person B comes and does work and then job is closed whilst door is left flapping in the wind.

Complaining to VM and they blame the kids, yeah, course it is nothing to do with your contractors has it.

I have noticed that if you phone the number to raise cabinet issues they do come (slowly) if it's just a door. So, being fair to VM it is a bit like the office printer not working and everyone moaning but then never letting the service desk they need to come and fix. However, if VM want buy in from customers they need to investigate why cabinet doors are being left open when trends happen and who's working on them. You don't see this issue anywhere near as much with OR/BT.

Edited by gary333 (Wed 29-Jul-20 14:01:37)

For work redundancy I'm fortunate to have VM 100 and BT VDSL running on a Draytek Vigor 2860 without any issues. I think there is a newer model now however.
I have never had any issues with the Dual Link and at times when VM has been offline I didn't even notice.

I recently got Virgin 50mb0, speeds are good (550mbit down / 37mbit up) but like you have a lot of jitter. I decided to keep my old Sky 76mb FTTC line which is a lot more stable and gives me redundancy for working from home.

What I normally do is have my PC connected to Sky via ethernet and then put everything else in the house through the Virgin WiFi so I have no contention on my line. If I ever need to do any big downloads I just swap the ethernet cable over to Virgin.