Virgin Media - Cambridge CB2 - Fault / Congestion?

For the last week or two I've had pretty rough internet at times. Massive pings and packet loss.. I thusly reported this to Virgin Media who sent out an engineer to correct the power levels but still getting problems.

I have a ping monitor on my connection:

30mbit TBB ping

And Virgin seem to say they don't see a problem.

It's not my own use causing this. Just wanted peoples opinions. Don't normally have any trouble here in Cambridge.

Your link isnt working need to remove the extra http:// and % from it
Looks like congestion post on the virgin forums to confirm and good luck for an actual fix

Edited by deleted (Sun 11-Dec-11 12:43:06)

Yes congestion for sure and pretty bad. If you see a bloke with horns and a long pointy tail on ice skates there's an outside chance VM may get around to fixing it. If not look to moving on if at all possible.

Since they released 100Mbps unlimited the number of areas with severe congestion has increased for some reason nobody in VM seems to be able to pinpoint. In the meantime as they can't figure out what the problem may be they've decided to deny having one.

Ahh 100mbit. I see. I guess that makes sense.

Also the pingtest url is

Pingtest

I couldn't add it to the original post. I've posted on the VM forum but fear my post will go ignored like when I had issues before.

They'll answer it but it takes about a week these days - subscribe to the post.

For me it was - yes your CMTS is overutilised and we've raised fault nnnn (note there appears to be no routine monitoring - they wait for complaints). You'll then have to ask when a fix is scheduled because you can't track these faults in any way yourself - in my case it was three months away. Now some faults remain in place with ever delayed fix dates. In my case there was an unannounced outage of several hours and I was on a new CMTS which was marginally less overloaded than the first. On enquiry that was it - the fix was completed early and the new (still overloaded) connection didn't exceed their limits - over 80% utilisation for 10% of the time - any network running on at over 70% on the tiny local pipes VM use (200down 18up) at the speeds they sell is a horrible experience.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Mon 12-Dec-11 06:24:58)

Looks like classic congestion, though at a guess it is only one or two 50 or 100 Meg users causing it.

I called faults up in Mumbai? And they said they see high utilisation that they know about and that there's no ETA on it being fixed or anything.


But "don't worry about it sir" .. "it'll get fixed".


Just wish I could get someone from this country to talk to. :/

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Looks like classic congestion, though at a guess it is only one or two 50 or 100 Meg users causing it.

A single 100Mb user can use 55% of an upstream port's capacity. Sadly this doesn't work with the amounts of modems Virgin can sometimes have on upstream ports. They are hoping that upstream bonding will make a big difference, and it should. 2 x 10Mb users on a 36Mb channel works better than a single 10Mb user on an 18Mb channel for the same reasons as the datastream 'skinny pipe' issues way back when.

Probably the same answer from UK staff, ie. they do attempt to improve capacity, but it is a constant battle with the growth of traffic.

If the issue is 100 Meg users using a dispproportionate amount of traffic, then the curbs on that product will appear.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

If the issue is 100 Meg users using a dispproportionate amount of traffic, then the curbs on that product will appear.

As VM are driven by marketing and BT Infinity will soon be 80Mbps unlimited imo it's a whole lot more likely that there will simply be more congested areas unless the forthcoming changes to traffic management are pretty draconian.