Virgin are "implying" that the BQM is not reliable

having lots of drop outs on the Virgin Broadband,

the BQM plots show times the dreaded red lines in the graph, which I understand showing lost packets from the BQM. which ties into the times we have no internet access,

Virgin are trying everything they can to say its my wired house that causing the problem ,

My understanding is the BQM of yours, is doing a test to the virgin hub , which is in hub mode, NOT modem mode.

There are only 4 of us in the house,
we have our own wifi access points,, wired back to our switch , along with the 4 computers and the 6 TVs , all wired to the swicth,

had many a technician round to test the signal strength and the cable connection,

Is it possible that we could be causing the dropped internet we see on the BQM plots ?

In reply to a post by qandrewmm:

Virgin are trying everything they can to say its my wired house that causing the problem

Is that the call centre or the forum? The forum team are worth asking as they usually ask people to set up a BQM.. (they’re more technical than the call centre).

They fobbed me off loads about packet loss since getting Gig 1 - they let me cancel for free after 2 engineers said everything was fine.(I done it all via the community forum)

been on the forums and on the phone
anyone know of a way the BQM can be blocked by activity on my side of the hub firewall ?

No but the hub software can choose to ignore the BQM constant ping if it wants to. Try in modem mode if you have a spare router.

Are you certain the hub can ignore a ping ?
its not set in the hub settings to do this .
if the hub ignored a ping, would the internet drop out for users at the same time ?
could the hub ignore say 10 minutes of time, as Im seeing 10 plus minutes of no internet on the BQM,

As for getting my own firewall, and putting hub in modem mode,
how could I argue that its the virgin network thats dropping , as they would say "its your kit"

Its possible to ignore ping (ICMP ECHO) as many home routers (“hubs”) from other ISPs ignore them completely.

You should also check the logs and the signal levels, and post them on the community forums, or in the Virgin forum on this board. (This is the BQM forum).

Thank you
done power levels etc on the virgin forum

I came here as the virgin people are saying that your BQM is unreliable,and can be blocked by my internet access from the house, and the fact BQM shows say 10minutes of outage every now and then is my problem not theirs, as BQM is un reliable

Wonder what the users here thoguth of the Virign comment

As far as the BQM itself, I've found it to be very good on my VM circuit, responding to all the Hubs I've had over the years. Currently on a Hub 5 with no issues. However I ALWAYS use modem mode.
I'm a long time user of the VM Forums and I do know that some users have issues with the BQM either getting a complete red wall, or spurious drops and blocks of red. I can't recall if there is a permanent fix. You could try a 60 second factory pinhole reset and see if that works.
I assume the wiring to the Hub has been done by VM, and none of the Hub wiring has been done by yourself? Have you tried a single PC directly wired to the Hub as a test, therefore eliminating all other kit.?

Edited by Adduxi (Wed 10-May-23 12:52:54)

Thank you
done all the above,
its the fact that Virgin are "down playing" the BQM that worried me,
Thanks for your replies,
I apparently have a "snr technician" coming tomorrow ,
out of interest,
what do you use as your firewall ?
the one I had ran out of grunt and was limiting speed,
so if I do have to use modem mode of the HUB,
seems Im going to have to pay a fair amount for a gb/s capable firewall device.

In reply to a post by qandrewmm:

<snip>
out of interest,
what do you use as your firewall ?
<snip>

I use a Draytek Vigor 2927 Router, and it's more than enough for my needs at present. Wifi needs are serviced by PoE Access Points.
Currently VM350 and BT500 running concurrently.

BQM is not unreliable in general. Sure there may be times we've had issues, but they'd be exceptions, not the norm.
It may be that Virgin routers behave in a way which means the BQM graphs show things which don't cause you problems - but the BQM itself is not the problem - it's the router deciding how to respond either due to capacity or configuration. If anyone at Virgin says otherwise, feel free to tell them to contact us.

Btw - we've worked with one provider not too long ago who saw issues on BQM with jitter I think - they were thinking it was our problem but then discovered a bug in their core router software that was causing it. They worked with the vendor to get a fix. We never wrote about it nor do we try to just badmouth ISPs. We run a network so we fully understand it's not possible to do this 100%. We don't try to persuade people to 'switch' providers to make money because provider X is bad - we try to help people to fix problems, and that applies to providers too. If Virgin want to talk to us about how to use BQM themselves we're happy to do that. We'll also talk to them confidentially about the issues if needed, but we won't stop users using the tool to find problems.

It's possible that Virgin's hub doesn't like ICMP echo (what these 'pings' are) and rate limit them etc.. these may show red on the BQM. The way to ideally use thw BQM is to show a good BQM which turns bad when you have problems - that's indicative of a problem. More so if it goes good to bad to good to bad aligning experience etc. A modem mode solution removes the hub's management plane from the equation. The question is if you do use it as a router does it have issues with other traffic too. If not then you might not care about BQM but if it does then you would.

I'm kind of hoping to add more BQM sources to the system in the next few months. It may be something we offer for 'premium' members (e.g. those who engage on the site more etc) as it's something we may not have as much capacity for.. or maybe we'll just hide it a bit so fewer people choose it. We'll be using smaller boxes in the other sites.


seb

Thank you for all your help

Very many thanks
I have "snr technician" coming tomorrow ,
I'l let you know how it goes,
I have been around these forums for decades,
and I have high confidence in you services,
so very worried with virgin bad mouthing you guys,

In reply to a post by qandrewmm:

Very many thanks
I have "snr technician" coming tomorrow ,
I'l let you know how it goes,
I have been around these forums for decades,
and I have high confidence in you services,
so very worried with virgin bad mouthing you guys,

For what it's worth I've seen a 'senior' Openreach engineer who didn't know what 'ping' did before and was talking about all these new young people who come in and don't know much

I have also had a Cisco employee CCIE consulting for one of the medium sized telcos ask what a route-map was.. That may not mean much to most but it's pretty basic concept in BGP routing and said person was consulting to an ISP network

I think seniority depends very much on the experience area they are in. Knowing much about how to run fibre doesn't mean you know much about IP

We are confident enough to know we can have problems but if we do we ask people to tell us so we can look. Sometimes problems aren't as simple as 'it works with X but not with Y'.. even a problem only affecting Virgin *could* be our side.. but my experience is it's more likely to be on theirs.. if not because our network is far simpler. Not a judgment on their network but few people will have complete sight of it.

Sometimes it's easier to blame others. We deal with it with first level support a lot. Maybe ask about the modem option and see what they say.

seb

Edited by seb (Wed 10-May-23 18:41:07)

Thank you
you sum up my sentiments very well,

VMO2 staff tell people with issues to set up a BQM, it's one of their regular 'restart the response clock' techniques so this could be interesting.

In reply to a post by seb:

I have also had a Cisco employee CCIE consulting for one of the medium sized telcos ask what a route-map was.. That may not mean much to most but it's pretty basic concept in BGP routing and said person was consulting to an ISP network

Wow. Just wow.

In reply to a post by XGS_Is_On:

In reply to a post by seb:

I have also had a Cisco employee CCIE consulting for one of the medium sized telcos ask what a route-map was.. That may not mean much to most but it's pretty basic concept in BGP routing and said person was consulting to an ISP network

Wow. Just wow.

Happens with a lot of "paper" CCIEs/CCNAs etc - they have all the qualifications but not the most basic experience.

An update ,
had a new pair of techs come today ,
they took one look at the BQM graph, and went oh yes..
They have identified the problem it seems is in the street box,
repaired street box booked in for tomorrow

Thank you guys ,

I have BQM running with Hub4, I dont trust the hub because it frequently drops the packets see the snapshot below, we were using the connection at the time so know the connection wasnt down (the sold red area generally means the hub is offline).
Its been mentioned loads of times that the Virgin firmware in the hub isnt the most stable...

My Broadband Ping

I also have a samknows white box that reports all disconnections (even 30 secs) and none were reported at the same time!

In reply to a post by qandrewmm:

An update ,
had a new pair of techs come today ,
they took one look at the BQM graph, and went oh yes..
They have identified the problem it seems is in the street box,
repaired street box booked in for tomorrow

Thank you guys ,

yay.. great outcome

In reply to a post by Philce:

I have BQM running with Hub4, I dont trust the hub because it frequently drops the packets see the snapshot below, we were using the connection at the time so know the connection wasnt down (the sold red area generally means the hub is offline).
Its been mentioned loads of times that the Virgin firmware in the hub isnt the most stable...

My Broadband Ping

I also have a samknows white box that reports all disconnections (even 30 secs) and none were reported at the same time!

Other than the big red bit.. there's only very occasional dtops.. it looks like 5 packets dropped in 24 hours.. I don't think that's really anything to be concerned about. if it was 1% consistent then maybe worth a look into but that looks fine - the jitter (max latency vs minimum) however is a bit more wavey.. and that could be from the router too.

Remember we ping once a second so those tiny dots are going to be very short drops.. whether by hub or otherwise.

In reply to a post by seb:

In reply to a post by Philce:

I have BQM running with Hub4, I dont trust the hub because it frequently drops the packets see the snapshot below, we were using the connection at the time so know the connection wasnt down (the sold red area generally means the hub is offline).
Its been mentioned loads of times that the Virgin firmware in the hub isnt the most stable...

My Broadband Ping

I also have a samknows white box that reports all disconnections (even 30 secs) and none were reported at the same time!

Other than the big red bit.. there's only very occasional dtops.. it looks like 5 packets dropped in 24 hours.. I don't think that's really anything to be concerned about. if it was 1% consistent then maybe worth a look into but that looks fine - the jitter (max latency vs minimum) however is a bit more wavey.. and that could be from the router too.

Remember we ping once a second so those tiny dots are going to be very short drops.. whether by hub or otherwise.

Agreed, the connection is stable, the long outage is the hub seemingly deciding to drop all the packets for a few hours, who knows why, its been doing it for years!

The stability is the best its been, VM have been doing some work recently.

We are soon to get CityFibre, and now Openreach are rapidly building out, our pole now has 3 different sets of equipment on top.

In reply to a post by Philce:

Agreed, the connection is stable, the long outage is the hub seemingly deciding to drop all the packets for a few hours, who knows why, its been doing it for years!
The stability is the best its been, VM have been doing some work recently.
We are soon to get CityFibre, and now Openreach are rapidly building out, our pole now has 3 different sets of equipment on top.

Ah yeah that is odd. It could detect the pings as an attack so may be worth checking in case there's any settings that might affect that.