100mb virgin connection

Are there any problems with the virgin 100mb connection speeds as I am consistently getting 65-70mb at any time of the day I have yet to get anywhere near the quoted 100mb speed I have been a 50mb user for a number of years and always have been getting 50 mb consistently I live in the Swindon area

How are you testing your speed?

I have been using speedtest.net for a number of years using the Maidenhead or London servers. For the last few years I have been on a 50mb connection, this site has been giving me consistent 49-50mb test results at all times of the day but since I have switched to a 100mb connection I have been unable to get anywhere near the 100mb speed 80-90mb would be nice which I would be very happy with but currently the test results I am getting back are very inconsistent using the speedtest site I have used the think broadband test and it has come up with a worse result only giving me 50-60mb I have had virgin media visit and they used one of their test sites and fiddled with a few settings and they did get 80-90mb off a Virgin test server in Birmingham but I have tried this virgin site my self and can only get 65-70mb at any time I think the Virgin network not ready for this kind of speed yet due to Virgin having to upgrade all their cabinets with new components I remember having the same problem when I subscribed to the 50mb service right at the beginning what do you think?

You need to test in the wee hours to see if you can fill the connection.

Our tester is on multiple Gig connections, and we do see people get speeds over 100 Meg regularly from fibre services.

Speedtest.net has various servers, and some may only be hosted on a 100 Meg, as are a great number of websites still. Thus to saturate a 100 Meg connection, you often have to run multiple downloads from multiple sources, to also avoid any congestion on a providers peering links.

In reply to a post by squash8720:

I think the Virgin network not ready for this kind of speed yet due to Virgin having to upgrade all their cabinets with new components

Because of overheads the current VM config files will not give to 100Mbps of download. The 50Mbps config is actually 53Mbps so can deliver 50Mbps of download. To comply with ASA regulations VM will be upgrading their 100Mbps config files to allow 100Mbps of download (and even further screw up areas where they've actually sold it to somebody who uses it for anything other than speedtests and browsing).

Before VM launched the 100Mbps unlimited service and by doing so completely screwed up my area I could easily achieve 50Mbps from measured downloads or Speedtest.net (which actually shows peak not average speed although it is easy enough to monitor the actual download on a PC anyway). I never could from TBB but couldn't identify exactly why - I'm guessing it must have been the routing.

VM don't need to do anything more to support 100Mbps speeds in most areas. They do need to make substantial improvements to their local pipes to provide the actual bandwidth selling such speeds to heavy users will generate. Currently more and more areas are becoming badly congested just as mine did. As soon as I can move on to Infinity I'll be going. I may even risk ADSL if things get much worse but the unresolved HR DIS fault on the phone line which pushed me to cable a couple of years back puts me off the inevitable hassle of returning.

In general cable can support high speeds but not continuous high bandwidth usage - a couple of 100Mbps users can saturate the local pipe shared with 100+ other users. ADSL has problem matching cable speeds but can fairly easily provide huge bandwidth over fibre to the exchanges (or now to street cabinets). ADSL is uncontended back to the cabinet/exchange where there will be 100+ modems on a 200Mbps group of channels on cable. Upstream is even worse with only 18Mbps available to those 100+ modems. My own connection no rarely ever reaches the 1Mbps allowed by the config (I downgraded to 10Mbps as that's mostly all it can manage a lot of the time).

Just as ADSL was a kludge providing BB over a medium not designed for it cable was designed as a TV distribution system and kludging BB onto it involves compromises. Those compromises are becoming very visible as VM marketing push higher and higher headline speeds over infrastructure that simply can't economically provide the local bandwidth that is now being used.

A few users can saturate a local node quite easily with something like 100mbit, the problem is that finding things to download at a constant 100mbit sustained is not actually very easy unless you're deliberately trying to get a high throughput.

At a peak of nearly 12MB/sec an hours downloading will fill about 42Gb of data

10 and a bit hours of doing that and you've filled a 500Gb hdd, you can do that easily with the right sources, but it's not something you'd do every day.

I download a LOT and have done over the years and the internet connections are fast outrunning the need to use them, I have 50mbit now and even large downloads are only saturating the connection for a few minutes at a time.

I'd say that connection speeds of the superfast connections are out-growing the backbone right now, but the total amount of content being transferred isn't growing as fast, so the backbone more often than not will cope.

I think local node congestion is more of a problem, some built up areas just aren't upgraded fast enough, if you're in an area that isn't locally congested like me, then you'll more or less get 50mbit flat out constantly at most times of the day.

This is under the assumption everything downloaded is stored persistently.

streaming eg. doesnt get stored.

also for people who download "because they can" and they "pay for unlimited use", they may well trash a large chunk of what they download ie. it gets deleted very quickly when realise junk and then burn a large chunk of the rest to keep hdd space freed up.

a single user on 100mbit simply doing a speedtest will probably cause ping spikes as remember there will be other utilisation aside from that user, I also think its reasonable to assume the vast majority of 100mbit customers on VMs service are heavy users, I would guess at a minimum of downloading 300gig a month and quite easily going into multiple TBs. Whether or not there is any doing a TB a day I dont know but it wouldnt surprise me if there was.

Judging by what I see (virtually constant upstream congestion) then I think the issue is simply seeding torrents and somehow evading or plain defective shaping - or possibly hosting porn webcams although with only 10Mbps upstream it would need to be a pretty small business.

I just ran a speedtest and in fact it's OK this morning but it's not unusual to see limited upstream even at 6:30 am. For example - http://speedtest.net/result/1634423271.png

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

Judging by what I see (virtually constant upstream congestion) then I think the issue is simply seeding torrents and somehow evading or plain defective shaping - or possibly hosting porn webcams although with only 10Mbps upstream it would need to be a pretty small business.

I just ran a speedtest and in fact it's OK this morning but it's not unusual to see limited upstream even at 6:30 am. For example - http://speedtest.net/result/1634423271.png

in your case maybe yeah.

In my case its been confirmed I have "very high" downstream utilisation so someone somewhere (probably multiple people) is caning the downstream. I also clearly have high upstream utilisation as well tho although I think its below their thresholds. Of course its entirely possible with the shared pipe been so small noone is caning it and it could be congested just from moderate use.

Another thing to consider is that aside from 100mbit, VM stopped sending out usage letters a while back after the ASA ruling.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 15-Dec-11 06:43:31)

There may be some downstream congestion on mine too but as I've downgraded to 10Mbps it has to be pretty dire before I'd spot it. Since the split the TBB chart certainly looks better than before but they admitted there is still some high utilisation - just not high enough and long enough for them to raise a fault.

It will be interesting to see what the new traffic management does to the utilisation - if it works I suspect that there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the impact on volume downloads. I really can't blame the wailers either - just what is the point of having 100Mbps if you can't download anything sizeable at that rate?