Virgin fibre extremely unstable - Virgin engineer useless

Hi!

I find myself in a tricky situation, my broadband has become extremely unstable to the point where I can't work properly anymore. I have to use a VPN and work remotely on another machine, and the nature of my job requires me to have real time, stable and fluid feedback from that machine (I'm a CG animator).

I harassed my ISP to try and fix the issue, and they eventually accepted to send me an engineer.
When he arrived I exposed him the evidences of my issue, which I will be posting here as well, and the guy almost mocked me. "I usually come to homes where they lose internet for days or couple of hours... not couple of seconds". Like if it was totally normal to have unstable connection. He patronized me all over the place, told me the box shouldn't be there and should be somewhere else ???? and changed a splitter and left ??? It fixed absolutely nothing and I am starting to despair. I would gladly change ISP but my building is not connected to the grid so I feel trapped with Virgin. Sometimes it's impossible for me to work for as long as 45 minutes, multiple times in a day.

I have run the tests Virgin asked me to do multiple times, they tell me there is no problem on their end of things.

These are how my ping stability tests are looking, it happens both Wi-Fi, ethernet cable plugged directly and/or in a powerline. Tried from multiple machines as well. The connection used to be OK 1 year ago.
https://ibb.co/f08zSty
This is the tool I have been using: https://ping.canbeuseful.com/en#ping

You can also check out results from my Quality Broadband Monitor:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

Please let me know if you have any idea what I should try to investigate this situation?

Thank you very much,
Paul

Can you post the logs from the Virgin Hub box?
You can also post in the Virgin forum on here, where many other people experienced in these issues post.

My M200 service with Hub 3 often disconnects when I’m working from home in the summer months. Apparently the street cabinet gets warm, and it causes the problem. I now work from the office again as I use a lot of remote desktop and SSH sessions which were disconnected.

Your technician (they have no engineering qualification) has forgotten that home users stream, but businesses need connectivity that is reliable.

You may have alternatives from Openreach, or using mobile data (e.g. Three, EE, Vodafone, O2).

Edited by jchamier (Tue 28-Jun-22 19:41:23)

Not being funny here, but is your service a Consumer/Residential service or a Business Service?

They have separate SLAs and fix times etc. I wouldn't recommend running anything real-time on a residential service as theres no guarantee.

In reply to a post by haydnwalker:

I wouldn't recommend running anything real-time on a residential service as theres no guarantee.

The "business" services from VM come with baggage that can cause issues (e.g. the fixed IP and Hitron modem/router used instead). When many people just want to work from home, since the pandemic.

If the OP has the same issues as myself, then a "business" grade service won't make any difference to the technicians inability to replace a faulty 30year old street cabinet.

The sensible choice is to have multiple options for broadband from different networks, e.g. Virgin, Openreach and mobile data (4G/5G). Instead of paying one of them a mark up for a service designed for lots of users.

All Virgin engineers i had come out to me to look at my business line have been residential engineers. The last one who came to swap my router out due to the digital phone line upgrade, left my router not working and didn't know how to make it work. Also the engineers on the phone couldn't tell me, after an hour of speaking to them what my static IP subnet mask was. They didn't even know what a subnet mask did.

If you need a reliable connection then Virgin isn't the one! We have client who had no choice to use Virgin connections for the speed and all engineers who came out when there were issues were useless.

Virgin on their business lines do maintenance during office hours as well which is just ridiculous!

Sorry i can't help but my advise is try another service. You won't get anywhere with Virgin,

Fortunately my BT FTTP connection goes in tomorrow. Once confirmed working I'm leaving Virgin and never going back!

In reply to a post by haydnwalker:

Not being funny here, but is your service a Consumer/Residential service or a Business Service?

They have separate SLAs and fix times etc. I wouldn't recommend running anything real-time on a residential service as theres no guarantee.

VM have no SLA'a on Residential services, and in fact years ago I believe it was in the T&C's that using circuit for work was forbidden. VM also do not guarantee Wifi speeds, only wired directly to the Hub.
Business lines have an SLA, but use the same circuit, so no difference in resilience etc.

If the OP can get an Openreach based supply, the latency should be better, but the speeds may be poor. I have both VM and BT for redundancy, and over the years, BT has been a lot more stable.

Edited by Adduxi (Wed 29-Jun-22 08:10:48)

In reply to a post by Adduxi:

VM have no SLA'a on Residential services, and in fact years ago I believe it was in the T&C's that using circuit for work was forbidden.

Many ISPs had similar terms, and I think it was clarified years ago they meant running a business from home, not "home working" for another employer. Either way, the pandemic showed to all ISPs and the country that everyone being at home on the internet wasn't going to break them. (Which is what they were worried about).

VM also do not guarantee Wifi speeds, only wired directly to the Hub.

No ISP can guarantee, radio is radio.

Business lines have an SLA, but use the same circuit, so no difference in resilience etc.

Well you could go to the real business division and have a real leased-line installed, which does not use the DOCSIS residential network, but that would require digging the street and planning permission. My own experience in a office block is that VM's leased lines are excellent.

If the OP can get an Openreach based supply, the latency should be better, but the speeds may be poor. I have both VM and BT for redundancy, and over the years, BT has been a lot more stable.

The speeds will depend on distance for FTTC, the latency will depend which of the 40+ ISPs is chosen. You may be with BT Retail.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by Adduxi:

VM have no SLA'a on Residential services, and in fact years ago I believe it was in the T&C's that using circuit for work was forbidden.

Many ISPs had similar terms, and I think it was clarified years ago they meant running a business from home, not "home working" for another employer. Either way, the pandemic showed to all ISPs and the country that everyone being at home on the internet wasn't going to break them. (Which is what they were worried about).

That does pre-date streaming and cloud services, where residential users ended up being bigger consumers of bandwidth than business.

Edited by alexatkin (Mon 08-Aug-22 18:23:06)