Help!!

Can anyone point me to the right place here? I have been trying to check my broadband with virgin media as I got a cloud based gaming system and for the first 4 days it worked fine but now I get chucked off it all the time and its like the Internet keeps going off, I did a monitoring test and got a graph but I'm not sure what it means, I'm just trying to find out if it's my connection or the cloud based computer (which nobody else is struggling with) I have a picture of the graph but I don't know how to paste it here so other people can see it. Can anyone help in anyway. Thanks.

Is it the thinkbroadband graph (BQM) or some other one?

If it's BQM then below it on the Main Site there are links for the live one and a calendar to choose a specific 24 hours.

If it is some other graph, upload it to a site such as Google drive or similar and post the link to it.

Hi, it is the BMQ one, I thought I'd be able to just add it as a pic but I guess there's another way to show it to people here?

*BQM

In reply to a post by Leaper1981:

Hi, it is the BMQ one, I thought I'd be able to just add it as a pic but I guess there's another way to show it to people here?

Use the link that pluralist pointed you to.

If you look at this post, in the user's sig there is a link to his live BQM. If you can't see his sig then on the on this site (theses forums) click on My Home in the top menu and scroll down to the bottom. There click on Display preferences and at the bottom of that page is a Radio Button to turn sigs on or off.

Go to the Main Site and log in there, and in your Profile there you will find your BQM(s) listed. Click on it and it should show your live one.

Under that is a link to the live graph, but under that you can choose a day from a calendar and see a full day in the past with the link to that.

I can't show you a screenshot of the page as these days I have a very volatile IP address (on mobile broadband) so it's not worth having a BQM.

This forum basically doesn't allow pictures. Only links to them. Ordinary pictures like photographs you upload the photo to any sharing site and then post the link.

In reply to a post by Leaper1981:

*BQM

I'm not sure what that post is for, but it doesn't do anything . It's just text preceded by the asterisk.

I've created my own graph etc, it's the bit about how u can let someone see it, like you've mentioned you can't attach pictures which makes it more difficult, I'll try to work out a link way as you suggested, just makes this way harder than it should be, I mean I read the bit about how to understand the graph and was still confused whether it was normal or not lol, I thought coming on here it would be easy to let others see who do know but even this is a nightmare lol

BTW the *BQM was because I had written BMQ in the previous post

Click on <Share Graph>, then <Generate> and it will produce a list of links. Chose the link for TBB, copy and then opaste in the thread.

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

Hopefully this is right

That is it ...

Well done .

That patch from 7:10pm to 8:10pm is appalling, with the rest of the evening unhealthy, but it's time for bed for me so not going any deeper.

Though there don't seem to be any re-syncs and possibly no actual loss of PPP connection. With luck others will comment in the morning long before I'm around.

In reply to a post by pluralist:

In reply to a post by Leaper1981:

*BQM

I'm not sure what that post is for, but it doesn't do anything . It's just text preceded by the asterisk.

I understood it was to correct "BMQ" in the previous post.

As an aside to Leaper1981, there is an "Edit" button next to your previous posts so you can correct them, at least for a limited time after posting.

Guess what!

I hadn't noticed the typo.

Just like you didn't notice:

In reply to a post by Leaper1981:

BTW the *BQM was because I had written BMQ in the previous post

Got there in the end 😂

The reason I was checking was because I had got access to a remote gaming service & for the first 4 days it ran fine then after that I kept getting kicked out of the remote computer so although I knew remote gaming can have issues from their end it had ran fine for almost a week so I didn't think it was them. The point where the red bits are coming down was while using the online gaming service. I feel like this might have been occurring for sometime but was never really an issue as before using this service all I was really doing was general Internet browsing so if it cut out and came back on quickly it didn't really cause me a problem. I felt like that graph was saying something wasn't right but just wanted to check.

Actual loss of sync or shows as the red going all the way to the bottom and staying solidly there for several "ticks". I've not seen that word used before on these forums, but I'm using it to define the frequency of each entry along the x-axis. Each entry represents 100 pings. Averaging at 100 seconds.

Once you have registered an IP address for monitoring, we will ping that IP address sending small ICMP echo requests. We send a ping each and every second and average 100 seconds of pings for each point displayed on the graph.

A loss of just PPP can show as a spike all the way to the bottom, though I'm not sure it always does.

Edited by pluralist (Sun 09-Jan-22 18:06:05)

Bob remember as VM02 use DOCSIS on their cable networks there is no concept of sync. or PPPoE as there is on Openreach. DOCIS networks have delay characteristics that aren't necessarily directly equivalent to DSL.

Hehe !

My ignorance of DOCSIS beyond seeing it achieve speeds over copper that Openreach found impossible is so great that I never realised what you post. I have nothing to forget .

Seriously, a very good point of which I was totally ignorant. What effect it has on the interpretation of a BQM I haven't yet thought about. Can you help the OP?

That graph is absolutely atrocious, the red spikes from the top are packet loss and when streaming your game you're looking at 30% packet loss and upwards. I'm actually surprised it worked at all and just gave you some intermittent disconnects.

One thing is highly likely on a VM network, and that's oversubscription, or in their words 'high utilisation'. It's also impossible for you to fix, it requires VM to split up your area ('segment it') so that you're sharing the bandwidth with fewer users, or implement DOCSIS 3.1 which in practice means you must be issued a Hub 4 rather than a Hub 3.

The VM forums have some helpful users who can talk you through checking the signal levels on your router in case that's the problem. The bad news is it's less likely, the good news is that's an easier fix that most general VM technicians can resolve quickly.

I suspect that the signal levels won't be an issue. The BQM looks generally OK before the period of gaming, and deteriorates heavily during the period the OP says he is gaming, roughly in the period from 19:00 to 20:30.

There are some further 4 or 5 nasty spikes in the period following roughly every half hour up to midnight. We don't know if further game play or heavy internet usage was happening then or something else?

To my untrained eye it looks like a very severe case of bufferbloat - perhaps in combination with a CMTS segment that is already quite heavily subscribed. It would be useful to understand what the sustained and peak data transfer rate (down / up) is during gaming. If the OP is completely soaking up all the available bandwidth, either down (or more likely up) on the connection then that will ultimately result in a BQM like that.

I would run some further bufferbloat tests to see how bad the connection is at other times of the day. OP could try:

https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat