Long term comparison - Virgin 300mb / Sky 80mb.

I have been using Sky Fiber now for around 2 years with their "Pro" 80/20 package.

Around 6 months ago I had some outages and instability which unfortunately coincided with some critical work I was doing which caused a major problems for the company I was working with. The next day I ordered Virgin because I didn't want to be put in that same position ever again

So I have been testing both systems side by side for the past 6 months and have been switching back and forth to try and get a feel for which is the better connection.

So far my testing is mostly unscientific in terms of how the connection "feels" - and I have been asking for opinions from my wife and family who are all avid internet users. I am planning on setting up a multi-homed mini-server which I can run some more scientific side by side tests. I am however using JD's Auto Speed Tester but because I'm changing connection frequently I haven't yet done some long term data gathering.

So first thought is....surely the 300mbit connection is better? Well not quite. In terms of real world throughput, Virgin is 4 times as fast. So if your priority is to download files as fast as possible, Virgin is the clear winner. However the user experience on Virgin doesn't quite match it's throughput capabilities.

The main difference is consistency. Virgin can go from 50-280mbit during the course of single day and it does vary that much throughout the week. The other obvious difference is latency. I play a lot of games and Virgin is consistently worse for ping and jitter, sometimes more than double that of Sky. Even off-peak at 3am the Jitter never goes below 20ms....

By comparison Sky is extremely consistent. Throughput sticks around 65mbit and my jitter is very low <4ms typically. Sites also just load faster. Fewer slowdowns on YouTube and other popular sites.

So as far as quality of connection, Sky certainly seems the better of the two especially If you play online games and latency/jitter are of a concern. If that isn't a concern then Virgin isn't that bad. It's a decent connection which often feels like an awesome connection in which you can have multiple heavy users at the same time with everyone getting a good chunk. It's just let down by the consistency. For example at 1:30 on a saturday afternoon I cant get more than 60mbit and my ping is bouncing around 30-80ms....

I will be keeping Virgin as I need to have a backup connection but I am going to remove the Homeworks package and move back to 200mbit because the line isn't achieving a consistent 200+mbit anyway so it's just money for nothing.

FWIW I live in East London. It would appear my local area has some contention problems.

Edited by deleted (Sat 19-Nov-16 13:42:02)

do you have the single threaded issues on VM that is talked about on here?

so e.g. multi threaded can be fast but single threaded a fraction of the multi threaded speed.

I am only testing multi-threaded via a number of servers in London/South England so I believe the speed to be reliable indication of available bandwith.

It's usually expected that you won't get as much speed in a single thread so that's a difficult problem to prove.

In reply to a post by dogzilla:

It's usually expected that you won't get as much speed in a single thread so that's a difficult problem to prove.

Try this tester. The dark green is single stream and the light green six-stream.

Uncongested they will be the same or thereabouts.

It's usually expected that you won't get as much speed in a single thread so that's a difficult problem to prove.

A single thread will only be slower generally in circumstances where congestion exists within the network... I would expect to get the same speed single and multi threaded personally.

ie mine http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Similarly but better
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Nice! I'd expect nothing less of AAISP. I am using WiFi, with other users online etc. This is mine where it was just me online:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

I must say my Sky connection was never nearly as smooth as BT for single threaded & virgin was diabolical.

I just moved flats so was a little worried I might see signs of congestion here, but seems just as good.

I also ran these tests twice and it seems that both our experiences have been the same.

1st time around I compared Virgin's 120mb against Plusnets 76mb service... at the time Virgin in my area was suffering very badly with contention issues, however Plusnet also had it own similar issues.

Plusnet was still much better.

Not long after the switch to Plusnet I had the Virgin connection disconnected, I also had the contract for the Plusnet service terminated due to long terms problems with Plusnet's network (now believed to be fixed)

I then switched to Zen's 76mb service and then had Virgin's broadband installed again for testing and as backup...

I was suprised to find Virgin had now fixed the contention issues in the area, however despite the huge performance boost before leaving, the service still couldn't keep up with the Zen connection, pages loaded slower, gaming could be inconsistent and bursts of packet loss and delays with streaming...

I spoke with a contact at Virgin locally and asked about the improvement made in the area and he said that a lot of work had been put in to remove noise issues in the local network (dead cable removal, new distribution kit in cabs, new connectors and one new run of coax between cabinets in the daisy chain)

I then moved out of my previous property and couldn't keep the Virgin connection, I do however still have a connection setp at my mothers house which has been fairly solid for many years however in the last 12 months it has shown the affects of free speed boosts with eveing contention starting to show, however the DSL locally is only 2-3mbps

I did setup a DSL connection for a while as a test, to my surprise web pages still seemed to load faster with 2.5/0.8 bandwidth available and the ping was also half that of the virgin connection.

If Virgin can find a way to reduce ping and the jitter on connections then they will probably be the true winners of broadband infrastructure but right now (as much as I hate to say it) BT's infrastructure in the superior one, and I'm looking forward to their future developments.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Similarly but better
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Also similar and slightly worse on Sky

In my opinion the single thread test is the best true measure of performance.

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

I also had the contract for the Plusnet service terminated due to long terms problems with Plusnet's network (now believed to be fixed)

Don't worry. They invented a new long term problem. Their spangly new network appears to have had teething problems. It's not plaguing me yet but I have a static IP address so may not be shunted onto the new network for a while.

https://community.plus.net/t5/Fibre-Broadband/Contin...

Latest posts have Support saying 'fixed by midnight'. Uh huh.

In reply to a post by dogzilla:

It's usually expected that you won't get as much speed in a single thread so that's a difficult problem to prove.

Not if you're on a proper ISP it isn't.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/14769...

That's actually quite bad for a PlusNet graph. I suspect the x6 jumping around is more down to my laptop and Flash though. I don't have a more recent test to show because I've disabled Flash and now use the HTML tester.

Edited by Andrue (Mon 21-Nov-16 10:10:28)

Or a difference in how provider is handling HTTP versus a generic TCP socket protocol on the flash test.

Real world across numerous networks and appreciable distances, it has always been the case that multi-threaded beats single threaded.

Firstly I'm not a network engineer (so that might explain it...),but my day job involves access to decent connectivity, I've been in or around datacentres for the past 15 years and have spent lots of time testing and or playing with some big connections as well as troubleshooting performance issues.

I don't remember ever coming across a real world situation where single threaded was faster when trying to max out a connection. I mean yeah if you are doing an iperf between two servers in the same rack and you've got decent switches with decent TCP window size then yeah i guess the single threaded is going to be identical if not faster (less overhead to move the same amount of data)


Here is a couple of tests from a server with 10 gig connection:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/5817969981

Quite the variation in results..... And I've tried this from about 10 different sites.

IMO the best method of judging your connection speed is a multi-threaded download from a VARIETY of sources. E.g. JD's auto speed tester - configured to do a multi-threaded download from a variety of different sources so that I'm not affected by slowdowns by a particular route or a particular server.

Some VM customers are affected by a very obvious single thread download speed problem. I'm one of them and used to be able to achieve 200Mb on single thread downloads, but over the last year it has dropped to around 50Mb.

Meanwhile speedtest.net continues to show 200Mb, but these speeds are simply no longer achievable on real world downloads. It makes a mockery of VM's claims such as "Download a movie in x minutes with VIVID 200" when the only way you can reach 200Mb is on multithread speedtests.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Edited by deleted (Tue 22-Nov-16 11:52:52)

In reply to a post by dogzilla:

Real world across numerous networks and appreciable distances, it has always been the case that multi-threaded beats single threaded.

That's not in dispute but the degree of difference is.

In reply to a post by dogzilla:

I mean yeah if you are doing an iperf between two servers in the same rack and you've got decent switches with decent TCP window size then yeah i guess the single threaded is going to be identical if not faster (less overhead to move the same amount of data)

Can't see how TCP window size impacts a local connection where round trip should be < 500uS.

In reply to a post by dogzilla:

Here is a couple of tests from a server with 10 gig connection:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/5817969981

Quite the variation in results..... And I've tried this from about 10 different sites.

Those results (even the speedtest.net) look appalling for a 10Gb/s connection. Or are you saying the server had a 10Gb card fitted?

In reply to a post by dogzilla:

IMO the best method of judging your connection speed is a multi-threaded download from a VARIETY of sources. E.g. JD's auto speed tester - configured to do a multi-threaded download from a variety of different sources so that I'm not affected by slowdowns by a particular route or a particular server.

There is no real dispute that you can measure your connection speed using multiple concurrent socket connections and this will probably lead to a higher figure but this really does not represent a true reflection of the real word speeds.

The point of this thread, however, is to look at a comparison between DOCSIS and VDSL2 based connections. To do this appropriately I would suggest that the test method needs to be representative of real world use. In my view this means comparison of single thread speeds on the two systems.

Here's my VDSL2 result at 12:54 today.

A typical speed test graph on a VDSL2 line

I am able to push 400mbit/sec over the Atlantic from France never mind just to London from a uk address, to latency and RWIN will not be the reason for VM customers assuming they not using a really old OS like XP which has no auto tuning for tcp buffers. anything vista and newer utilises auto tuning and likewise linux and FreeBSD have had it for years.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by dogzilla:

It's usually expected that you won't get as much speed in a single thread so that's a difficult problem to prove.

Try this tester. The dark green is single stream and the light green six-stream.

Uncongested they will be the same or thereabouts.

LOL mine is the other way around :/

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Yup = yummy

http://beta.speedtest.net/result/5818850336

I have absolutely no faith in the TBB tester. I just applied the test and got 120 Mb on the green and 116 Mb on the yellow. The single thread test actually does better than the multi-thread!. TTB has not reflected my actual broadband availability for a couple of year on either test.

With Speedtest.net and the DSLreports test (both multi-thread) I get I invariable get > 310Mb. I just got 262Mb on a single thread test in Testmy.net. I even get over 150Mb on US based servers.

Edited by deleted (Tue 22-Nov-16 18:23:07)

I've just dug around and found your test I believe. http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Single thread average 119.6 and multiple thread 146 Mbps.

DSL Reports can be 32 threads from various locations so any congestion is almost certainly bypassed, and the sampling in how speedtest.net behaves favours a higher result plus may be picking a data source on Virgin Media network. Ookla even claims that Sky has a 300 Mbps average speed service in London, so either their analysis is very wrong or some very odd tests being counted by them.

We can crank up thread counts and drop single thread if people do not trust it, but experience has shown it does reflect real world for many people.

That is incorrect. You just dug up a test I did on 4th. November. Play fair.

The actual test.


I quoted the burst figures. (Sorry) The full result is even more unrealistic! There is something wrong with TBB connections to VM and has been for some time.

The old test , you dug up, even on multi-thread gave me less than half of what most multi-thread tests give me.

Edited by deleted (Tue 22-Nov-16 18:46:16)

Had not noticed the date, difficult finding tests with little info.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/14798... the graph shows something is up, hence why we save them.

Multi thread is still doing better than single thread, the dip in the single is pretty classic of a connection with congestion, i.e. high start then fading away. One trick some testers also do, is start the multiple threads at different times, to exploit this effect to give the maximum result.

Not every one sees the problem http://tbb.st/1479839196293123055 http://tbb.st/147983829812656166453 http://tbb.st/1479830302340894355

Feel free to ignore our tester, but I'm confident in it being designed to and is showing the effects of issues that do affect users of providers. If Virgin Media want nice results all the time, then there are options to move payloads closer to the customers, but those tests would then be excluded from the national statistics as its not a fair and even comparison.