Virgin Media horrible ping / jitter compared to O/R

We've had a rock solid 70/20 openreach line (and no VM service available) for the last 3 years, which has been fantastic. VOIP / Teams works flawlessly, and the whole thing has been pretty fantastic save for a couple of line faults, which have been fixed within a couple of days.

Just moved to somewhere where VM is available, gone for the 500meg package. By comparison, its atrocious. Zen pings to google DNS were typically 4-5ms, VM sit at around 25 but jitter up and down like mad. Things like Google home devices are now really hit and miss, and I can tell the difference with teams calls dropping / lagging audio.

BQM for VM. I've not got the BQM for the zen line as haven't had it for a while, but you could barely see the green slither at the bottom, and there was practically no yellow. It may as well have been an ethernet connection. I'm running UniFi gear on top of all these devices, which has stayed the same between houses, so nothing to do with internal systems I suspect.

I've gone round with VM saying there aren't any faults - and I guess there probably aren't, its just a crummy implementation, and limitations of DOCSIS.

I'd much rather have an openreach 70/20 be rock solid latency wise than VM's blazing fast jitter-fest. Sadly I'm a couple of weeks over the 14 day cooling off. Is there any way of pressuring them to letting me out of contract?

Edited by bdav (Mon 25-Jul-22 13:47:31)

...Just got off the phone again from customer services. Apparently the ping doesn't go over 40ms, and packet loss is only 0.04% so all is fine. I'd query their thresholds for "acceptable" latency on a fixed line connection!

Count yourself lucky you actually have a very good BQM by virgin standards..

I recently made the same mistake, switching from a stable 80/20 FTTC line to Virgin's 500mbps service. I had a BQM graph similar to yours, with intermittent small amounts of packet loss. The big impact for me was Teams calls -- incoming video quality would badly fluctuate, I'd be kicked out of calls or people would get distorted voice from me.

I kept pestering support, and must've had at least five engineers out over the space of about 6 weeks. One would add an attenuator to the wiring, the next would remove it. Nothing made the situation any better. Complaints were ignored. In the end, I posted on their Community Forum, primarily about the fact they ignored my complaints and ended up with a back and forth with one of their UK based forum team.

I didn't get anywhere complaining about latency, but did focus on jitter and packet loss (with BQM evidence) and the impact that had on my use case and eventually they agreed to terminate the contract early (I was about 2 months into an 18 month contract). I swapped back to the FTTC connection that I'd delayed cancelling while I was having the Virgin problems, and then luckily for me about 3 months later FTTP became available. Never looked back.

So, I'd suggest the best route to go down is complaining on their forum and wait until one of their team picks it up and take it from there.

Looks good for VM, one of the downsides of DOCSIS.

I found complaining a lot and getting engineers out they will let you out of the contract after a few visits if you are still not happy. Good luck though

Edited by BuckleZ (Mon 25-Jul-22 16:09:11)

In reply to a post by bdav:

I'd much rather have an openreach 70/20 be rock solid latency wise

Problem is for many of us, its VM or a ~40 down, ~3 up FTTC connection. So a variable latency, and randomly disconnecting in hot weather 200/20 DOCSIS connection at £53 is for me, better for home working than an incredibly slow reliable connection at £45. YMMV. (My BQM linked below).

Your story sounds very similar to mine - Same issues.

I've just raised a complaint via CS. I'm not sure I can be bothered with the going back and forth with them, I did wonder about just raising a small claims court claim against them for the value of the ETF and seeing what they had to say.

In reply to a post by bdav:

Just moved to somewhere where VM is available, gone for the 500meg package. By comparison, its atrocious. Zen pings to google DNS were typically 4-5ms, VM sit at around 25 but jitter up and down like mad. Things like Google home devices are now really hit and miss, and I can tell the difference with teams calls dropping / lagging audio.

This is quite normal for Virgin Media - especially in areas that have high take up and usage.

Virgin has such latency and jitter variation that we actively tell our customers that some of our more latency sensitive services are not compatible with Virgin Media and we don't support them - because you just cannot get it sorted. If you're having those issues, it is highly unlikely it will ever get fixed, so your best bet is to argue the toss to leave and keep pushing them on it.

Yep thats my plan. Its really noticeable on certain devices that I wouldn't have thought would be that latency sensitive - I always know its going a bit bad as the Google Home devices start behaving a bit funky.

In reply to a post by bdav:

Yep thats my plan. Its really noticeable on certain devices that I wouldn't have thought would be that latency sensitive - I always know its going a bit bad as the Google Home devices start behaving a bit funky.

Virgin Media is consistently the worst provider for overall quality of the connection - they do a lot of shouting about raw speed for downloads, and they've often had the benefit of a captive market plus quad play services to draw people in, but in a straight choice I'd take an Openreach based service from *any* ISP over Virgin Media.

Incidentally, many of us feel the same when it comes to Virgin's Ethernet Business services too...