Virgin Media problems

Been having problems with my 10Mb fibre connection with VM for nigh on 2 months now. Quality is degrading further. I've phoned VM on several occasions and usually get given the runaround and going nowhere. I did manage to get through to their UK support a couple of days ago, which was actually more informative, but the news I recieved was grim.

I have catastrophic latency making gaming (my main use) impossible. Less than 1Mb/s download speeds making web browsing very slow (minutes to load pages, dial-up was faster). Hell, my girlfriend even has problems with farmville.

What I was told is that it's a utilisation issue. VM has oversold in the area. Here's the real kicker though, the utilisation is nowhere near the threshold that would cause them to upgrade the local hardware!

Here's a link to my connection quality on Sunday:

http://www.crazy88s.info/guild/goodies/shocking.jpg

The massive saturation and major packet loss conintued until midnight. The 'net was unusable all day, yet this doesn't qualify for an upgrade of hardware.

So, I'm paying for something unusable. What on earth can I do?

I cannot switch to ADSL. My local exchange isn't unlocked. I tried to go through a BT package (through O2 in fact, who re-sell it). That was even worse due to heavy traffic management that killed gaming traffic dead. O2 were powerless to do anything and BT are worse than VM for support.

While if the exchange is no LLU, there will be providers who can provide a reasonable service who are not Sky, o2, talktalk - there non-LLU is badly congested just like your VM service is.

The problem being you may end up paying more for it.

You have a slight misunderstanding re BT-based connections.

There are three (relevant) parts of BT involved.

BT Openreach physically provide the exchanges and lines.
BT Wholesale provide kit, (DSLAMs and MSANs) in the exchanges that any ISP can connect through to you. BTW then backhaul the traffic between you and all that ISP's other customers to various handover points to the ISP, where the ISP rents powerful kit which is very expensive.

Mass market ISP such as BT Retail (Total Broadband and Infinity) and O2 non-LLU rent a very small amount of capacity per customer at those handover points.

The result is they get congestion and/or impose traffic management.

Smaller ISPs such as IDNet, Zen and vivaciti rent more handover per customer and as a result give better throughput and often more consistent latency.

They cost more, because they rent more capacity per customer.

Compare my tbb BQM (link in my sig) with yours. (You don't seem to have spotted the "Share this graph" links below yours. Much easier than uploading it like you did ).

I know you can share graphs, I snapshotted that as I wanted to be sure I had a permantent copy of my own as I don't generally trust a third party link to be permanent.

As for getting ADSL from other people, I phoned around various suppliers and they all pretty much said the same thing; that they could not access the exchange and could only re-sell a BT product.

My reasons for picking O2 in the end was recommendations of friends and UK based support. I had to cancell it within the 28 days because latency for gaming was at around the 20k ms mark (but actual download speeds were around 6Mb/s).

Reselling a BT Wholesale product is VERY different from reselling a BT Retail product.

20k ms - I dont understand - do you mean pings were 20000 ms to hosts? Most ping tools timeout well before that time.

Zen/IDNet and other providers offer a very different experience to O2, in actual fact you might have even found BT Retail to offer a better gaming experience than O2 Access, which frankly they should abandon selling.

I'm talking in terms of displayed latency in gaming. In this case, World of Warcraft where, when connected to ADSL, would display at around 8000ms after first logging in, then climing upwards to around 20000ms before I'd then get disonnected. So I was limited to less than a minute of game-time before being kicked.

This happened every time I tried to use the line. Day time, night time.

It wasn't a bandwidth issue. Download seepds were between 1Mb/s and 6.5Mb/s. Regular pings, traceroutes, speedtest.net, pingtest.net all gave seemingly OK figures.

It wasn't a game server issue, as switching back to VM (as I clearly never cancelled it) immediately after trying gave 'playable' results (that is, 3 to 5 seconds of latency but at least I wasn't being disconnected).

How are you playing wow with latency in the seconds? Even above 200ms mine used to have serious glitching making fighting incredibly frustrating if not next to impossible.

>>vivaciti rent more handover per customer

I didn't know that vivaciti rented any backhaul. I thought they simply banked referrals for other operators.

Has something changed?

>>Zen/IDNet and other providers offer a very different experience to O2

I may be out of touch these days but Zen used to route to London via somewhere up North which will not be good for gamers in the South?

In reply to a post by RandomJointer:

>>vivaciti rent more handover per customer

I didn't know that vivaciti rented any backhaul. I thought they simply banked referrals for other operators.

Has something changed?

Out of context selective quote. Demonstrating a realisation of the weakness of your position. I notice you don't quibble over IDNet and Zen.

Additionally I was clearly referring to the handover capacity mentioned a couple of lines earlier. Are you going to tell me that you don't know the difference between the handover points and the backhaul? Why did you deliberately change it in your comment? Hoping to distract or mislead me or other readers? That seems to be the only possibility.

Do you also feel in a post that was reasonably long and complex I should have gone into needless detail of the ways retailers and multiple levels of wholesaler fit together, plus a full explanation of WBC? I made the relevant point as succinctly and understandably as I could, in a way a non-technician could follow. I don't think links to two or three SINs and several other BT documents would have clarified anything.

I'm sure you know that occasionally I agree with you and say so. Far more often though I understand your arguments, but find them unacceptable.

As I like to try to help people with things I have learnt rather than pick fights with you, (Oh - by the way, it's absolutely fantastic how far you have got in this world without the benefit of ever having read and learnt from anything in your whole life. I congratulate you), I usually let them ride. I find that in most cases others ridicule your views or the people looking for advice clearly see them for what they are - biased rants, so I can safely keep quiet.

In the last few days though you seem in several forums to have moved from that ranting to total derangement. Amongst other targets you have started to home in on perfectly sensible posts by myself and go ballistic. I note no apology for what seemed a gratuitous insult in TTTS, nor a statement that I had misunderstood who you were targetting.

As for here, it looks as though you have moved on from having a bee in your bonnet to having your testicles in a beehive.

Edited by RobertoS (Mon 23-May-11 23:03:10)