Have you ever seen a graph this bad (It is a competition)

I LOVE VIRGIN MEDIA

Contrary to popular belief the router was on the entire time, those 10 minute timeouts are in fact all to do with virgin's network. I have been having this "quality service" for a month now

Snark aside does anyone have any idea concerning what could be causing this? Like I said the router is working perfectly well I just keep getting T3 timeouts all day long. Strangely enough if I go on the virgin website and do the service quality check and it comes back as "there is an issue in the area" after 24 hours I get a full day's uptime but after that its back to the usual. To be clear this could just be my imagination it has only happened a couple of times and maybe I just got lucky on those days. Also a technician is coming on Wednesday but I would do anything to somehow fix this issues before then and not have to go down that rabbit hole!

Just some more details: Hub 3 router, both modem mode and non modem do this, aftermarket router for the actual connections in the home but it works perfectly (netgear nighthawk) the reported issue is always T3 timeout which is apparently an upstream issue but what could the problem actually be? Also it cyclically happens at around 10 am - 12 am and then around 4pm and 12pm but outages are also intermittent throughout the day.

Finally thanks for the BQM tool it really helped documenting this!!

EDIT: This one might take the cake!

Edited by ilovevirginmedia (Sat 08-Jun-24 23:28:05)

In reply to a post by ilovevirginmedia:

I LOVE VIRGIN MEDIA

Contrary to popular belief the router was on the entire time, those 10 minute timeouts are in fact all to do with virgin's network. I have been having this "quality service" for a month now

Actually I have seen worse on a Virgin connection but I don't know the context so I can't say it's Virgin as opposed to the user issue.

I also see another user with worse loss on an IP address which appears to be likely to be somewhere not too far from you. Their times don't however seem to match with yours. They had issues on 5/6 and 8/6; you started monitoring on 5/6 and saw significant issues on 6/6, 7/6, and 8/6.

Have you tried running an MTR to see where the issue may be happening from your end?

Can you share the city/town you're in here? I would be temp


seb

I would be happy to run a trace route, you are saying I should run it while the internet is down? I am not sure it will get very far but its worth a try. Do I just run it to any website like google.co.uk? Also I am in Stevenage in Hertfordshire. I did not start the BQM on the 5th, I started it on the19th but with the modem mode connection so the IP is different, I switched on the 5th to see if there was any difference and it only got worse..

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

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

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

Edited by ilovevirginmedia (Sun 09-Jun-24 10:22:38)

Ok traceroute done, should I post the healthy one here? It starts from my internal router to the modem/router to the first virgin (exchange?) that will probably be the thing that breaks.

Also here is a nice live graph

Edited by ilovevirginmedia (Sun 09-Jun-24 10:32:39)

I get similar in the hot weather. There is a faulty cabinet in my road that when it gets too hot, i get constant disconnections. Its a passive connection cabinet, small rectangle. A local technican moved my coax cable to the "other end" of the bar, which has helped, but he said the cabinet really needs to be replaced.

You need to post your Hub 3's logs on the Virgin Commuity Forums, along with the BQM and see if you can get more and more technicans out to look at the problem. Eventually you will get money back.

My guess is these problems won't be fixed until Project Mustang replaces the coax with FTTP.

Might be noise issues in your area if its coinciding with T3 timeouts, have you reported it?

Thank you for the suggestions!! I will bring it over to the VM community forum and yes I am having getting a technician sent over if that counts as reporting it. I also reported it ad nauseam to the live chat when I was negotiating my contract, the most I could squeeze out of them was £33 for M350 which was basically my deal when I joined in the first place. It is strange that for the first 18 months I had zero connection issues. Also the outages are not tracking with the exterior temperature. If this carries on I assume I could at worst cut the new contract as they are not delivering the promised service right? Unfortunately they also give the best speeds in my area everything else is your boring old copper with openreach fibre in 2026 at the latest.

I did seriously try to press them for at least a faster package but it was m500 at 39 and 1 gig at 70!!! lol

In reply to a post by ilovevirginmedia:

I would be happy to run a trace route, you are saying I should run it while the internet is down? I am not sure it will get very far but its worth a try. Do I just run it to any website like google.co.uk?

(I saw you posted later you did one - send me that instead but I've left this here in case others look for where to trace to)
Do it to 80.249.99.148 - An MTR may be better to see more than a single snapshot. You might want to run a few traces otherwise to see. Ideally you'd want the reverse from the Internet too but you need to capture it when there's an outage. If you see the trace go far try google.com as well.

In reply to a post by ilovevirginmedia:

Also I am in Stevenage in Hertfordshire. I did not start the BQM on the 5th, I started it on the19th but with the modem mode connection so the IP is different, I switched on the 5th to see if there was any difference and it only got worse..

Ah I was looking at the "Virgin Quality New" one only and didn't see the others on your account. The IP address on the one you set up in May ("Virgin Quality") is different though. You're currently posting from the IP of the "Virgin Quality New". The non-new one shows 100% loss anyway now.

I've checked the other user's BQM in Stevenage and it had issued on 28/5 and 22/5 for a significant single period each time (i.e. an hour or more).. they have short outages on some other days but not exactly matching yours.

In reply to a post by ilovevirginmedia:

Ok traceroute done, should I post the healthy one here? It starts from my internal router to the modem/router to the first virgin (exchange?) that will probably be the thing that breaks.
Also here is a nice live graph

You can probably post it here as long as it doesn't reveal your IP address; it will probably show your location to everyone here (City).. If you want to send me a private message with the full one that's fine too, but it does help for others to see things as well.

The first hop on most connections is a 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x -type IP address which is your router (modem won't show up I suspect as it won't be a Layer-3 hop). That wont' be unique to you in most cases so there's nothing hugely sensitive about it. The chances are you may show in the next hop which block of 250 IPs you're in.. If you're not sure send me a PM.


seb

Edited by seb (Sun 09-Jun-24 16:54:29)

All healthy traces

traceroute to 80.249.99.148 (80.249.99.148), 20 hops max, 46 byte packets
1 192.168.0.1 1.989 ms
2 *
3 80.4.208.53 12.003 ms
4 *
5 62.254.42.174 12.593 ms
6 *
7 84.116.135.50 13.509 ms
8 129.250.66.101 12.772 ms
9 *
10 129.250.3.249 14.698 ms
11 192.80.16.146 15.995 ms
12 80.249.97.20 14.915 ms
13 *
14 *
15 *
16 *
17 *
18 *
19 *
20 *

traceroute to google.co.uk (142.250.179.227), 20 hops max, 46 byte packets
1 192.168.0.1 2.561 ms
2 *
3 80.4.208.53 19.536 ms
4 *
5 62.254.59.130 22.355 ms
6 142.250.160.116 16.913 ms
7 *
8 192.178.46.84 14.595 ms
9 142.250.179.227 14.750 ms

traceroute to google.com (216.58.204.78), 20 hops max, 46 byte packets
1 192.168.0.1 2.559 ms
2 *
3 80.4.208.53 10.945 ms
4 *
5 62.254.59.130 13.319 ms
6 142.250.160.116 17.057 ms
7 *
8 216.58.204.78 33.095 ms

Virgin Quality is the router in modem mode which gives me a different ip address compared to Virgin Quality New which is the router in normal router mode. Why virgin swaps the IPs like this idk but I would guess each mode gives a different mac address and counts as a separate device. On the traceroute with modem mode the 192.168.0.1 is missing because that is my private router jumping to the VM router which in that mode only shows my real ip address, aka it acts like an actual modem. Here I have it in router mode so the first jump is 192.168.0.1

By MTR you mean the MTR utility? I have a traceroute function on my router but this program seems to route periodically so it might be useful to keep on when looking for an outage so the difference is recorded automatically. Thanks

Edited by ilovevirginmedia (Sun 09-Jun-24 21:30:56)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host.........................|..%..|.Sent...|.Recv...|.Best.|.Avrg.|.Wrst.|.Last.|
|----------------------------|-----|----------|--------|------|------|------|------|
| 192.168.1.1.............|...0.|....533.|....533.|.....0|.....0|....13|.....1|
| 192.168.0.1.............|..99.|....108.|......2.|.....3|.....3|.....3|.....3|
| No.response...........|.100.|....106.|......0.|.....0|.....0|.....0|.....0|
| lutn-core..................|...0.|....533.|....533.|.....8|....12|....29|....12|
| No.response...........|.100.|....106.|......0.|.....0|.....0|.....0|.....0|
| eislou2....................|...0.|....533.|....533.|....10|....15|....54|....12|
| 142.250.160.116.....|...0.|....533.|....533.|....14|....18|....37|....17|
| 216.239.42.41.........|...0.|....533.|....533.|....14|....19|....39|....18|
| 192.178.46.83.........|...0.|....533.|....533.|....13|....18|....36|....19|
| prg03s02.................|...0.|....533.|....533.|....14|....18|....38|....17|
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

I tried to fix the formatting best I could trust me it was worse before. This just to google.com but i dont think it says anything new, need to wait for an outage

Edited by ilovevirginmedia (Sun 09-Jun-24 21:56:25)