Virgin - fast speed but unusable for gaming

I’ve been with Irgun for donkey’s years (back to the telewest days). In our neck of the woods ADSL is still stuck at 2mbps with no plans for Openreach to upgrade the area.

For several months my connection (and my next door neighbour’s) have got steadily worse and worse when gaming (on any game, any server). It is now 100% unusable. Given that’s pretty much all I need a broadband connection for, I’m pretty miffed.

We have both lodged complaints with Virgin and got nowhere. Engineers have been out, and fixed nothing. If anything it has got worse. We have no point of contact at Virgin and have to keep going through the call centre.

We get inept call handlers who have even tried telling me that 100mbps is not fast enough for gaming! We are repeatedly told “your speed test results are fine”, despite us explaining every time that down/up load speeds are not the issue - it is latency spikes and packet loss.

I really don’t know where to turn. I would just leave, but they have us over a barrel given the state of ADSL in the area. Any advice would be appreciated.

Setup a Broadband Quality Monitor if you haven't done so already, have you accessed the router to see if there are many errors and timeouts? the problem may be a local fault or a wider congestion issue.

That was my issue too, they let me leave inside of contact due to it.

Gladly jumped to BT FTTP and it's been night and day.

This is unfortunately the situation for many Virgin customers at some point when congestion takes effect.

As DG834MAN suggested, if you can get BQM to work it may be useful in demonstrating issues, but short of alternatives, time is probably the only thing you can do to work around it, unless a DSL based service gives you better performance for your application. I certainly had cable and DSL and didn't use cable for anything work/sensitive.

One of the downsides of cable being a very large broadcast network is that your modem has to wait it's turn to send return packets. In a busy area, that can be a fairly long wait (in gaming terms) and will cause jitter. If you want to send a packet every 1ms but can only 'talk' every 3ms, then the game servers get your updates in batches that might mean you get told you fired after someone else, even if you saw it and reacted faster on your screen.

Virgin were slapped about by the ASA (one of many times) for claiming they had the best broadband for gaming. The old Ofcom broadband report used to include jitter as a measure and always showed Virgin as miles behind everyone else. Them moving to FTTP should sort it out as long as they don't do stupid like layer RFOG on their shiny new optical equipment.

In reply to a post by Skie:

One of the downsides of cable being a very large broadcast network is that your modem has to wait it's turn to send return packets. In a busy area, that can be a fairly long wait (in gaming terms) and will cause jitter. If you want to send a packet every 1ms but can only 'talk' every 3ms, then the game servers get your updates in batches that might mean you get told you fired after someone else, even if you saw it and reacted faster on your screen.

Virgin were slapped about by the ASA (one of many times) for claiming they had the best broadband for gaming. The old Ofcom broadband report used to include jitter as a measure and always showed Virgin as miles behind everyone else. Them moving to FTTP should sort it out as long as they don't do stupid like layer RFOG on their shiny new optical equipment.

I spoke to one of the network infrastructure guys over at Virgin and they are planning RFOG for deployment in my area as part of the "FTTP roll out", I obviously wasn't very happy when i heard this and suggested they used XGSPon or anything alternative as its simply stupid fitting old tech for the sake of it. I don't see the point in moving from coax to RFOG, its all the same in the end, it might make marginal improvements but it won't solve the problems they have with congestion anyway.

I think it's so they can use existing engineers who are only trained on coaxial installs, and stick to a common set of cable modems and set-top boxes. I'd be very surprised if they weren't already testing different CPE hardware internally, as well as different ways to migrate from RFoG to PON.

RFoG solves any interference problems, and presumably fixes any localised congestion problems as they'd have been pretty daft not to build to a PON-style splitter topology. This puts congestion into the network where it's much easier to resolve than when cable modem areas had to be split up.

Edited by jpm (Sat 04-Jun-22 00:04:43)

New build FTTP is still being built with RFoG. The cable network overbuild, Project Mustang, is XGSPON for Internet access.

Mustang is supposed to get rid of DoCSIS not extend its life in the UK slightly.

Some trials have been done with RFoG, they were build trials, others with GPON, others XGSPON.

The Mustang products are still over 6 months away and will be XGSPON. I suppose there might be some weird edge cases here but Mustang isn't just putting fibre where the coax was, it's an entirely new backhaul and access network, too.

Perhaps he was referring to TV services while VMO2 get an IPTV offering mature? That could work.

In reply to a post by XGS_Is_On:

Perhaps he was referring to TV services while VMO2 get an IPTV offering mature? That could work.

Nope, he said the build has started in my area (I know it has, people I know have been overbuilt (they have had endless issues as crews haven't been trained and took one month to find a basic fault with the fibre optics)

The cable wasn't connected the other end.

I'm sure you can see the issue here, if virgin don't teach the crews to check the fibre is connected then there is no hope.

All the crews that the person I know had broke more stuff and cost virgin over £500 in lost revenue and account credits.

So one crew changed the RFOG power supply to the wrong one, then one changed the coax but didn't crimp it correctly, the next one said the fibre was the problem, next said the fibre was working it was the power supply. In the end he got a manager and he was astonished with all the problems created, he gave a credit before he walked out the door and spent over an hour fixing everything all the previous techs broke.

I don't have much hope for any fibre at Virgin, not if the crews couldn't find that the fibre wasn't plugged in and caused more issues then there were to start with.
Tell me its not common sense to check a cable is plugged in. I thought it was normal to check things were connected.

The guy I spoke to said its RFOG "FTTP" deployment, words I didn't want to hear, I made it clear to him that if its the case, I will make sure that I and the neighbours leave for openreach FTTP. They already want to leave them because of faults, this has just scaled the deal as far as I see it.
But yeah its all broadband everything over coax. Virgin already use IPTV with their new TV box, its internet based, they even offered me one for free. Don't see why they need coax at all, seems to cause more problems.

In reply to a post by RR_The_IT_Guy:

Virgin already use IPTV with their new TV box, its internet based, they even offered me one for free.

They must be struggling with trying to provide a set of national products, whilst having different street infrastructure. My friends just left VM completely for freesat and streaming over FTTC due the TV6 box being upgraded to instead of recording what you select on the planner (as per Sky+ decades ago); to being a marker that sends you into the app for the broadcaster. In some cases the programme is not actually available. Why Virgin have done this is unclear, especially over legacy coax.