Speeds at peak times

The speeds I'm getting at peak times are awful. These are meant to be on a 30mb line.

Here is a speed test from recently:

Speed Test

and a ping test:

Ping Test

and thinkbroadband quality monitor

My Broadband Ping

I've complained to them many times over the last 6 months and nothing has been done. The estimated fix date just keeps on getting pushed backwards. Is there anything I can do to improve this?

Shocking congestion like that is becoming more and more common with VM. It is almost certainly one or more people very local to you constantly seeding torrents on a high end package. As already suggested - change provider because VM simply don't seem to care. If ADSL isn't viable then at least call retentions (150 on VM phone and take the "thinking of leaving" option) and ask for a rebate. I downgraded from 50 to 10 because ADSL wasn't viable and will be moving to Infinity soon.

I cant see even the comcast style shaping fixing that, is way too excessive congestion.

All that will fix it is hard limits

30 Meg, 100GB per month
60 Meg, 250GB per month
100/120 Meg, 600GB per month

No funny traffic management, just plain limits. That way people can't cheat with VPN's etc.

Alas the war with Sky and BT Retail, means it won't happen, until both of them also blink.

I have a feeling i'll be doing the same too. Infinity 2 reaches my exchange in about 8 weeks..... Sorry Virgin....

The other day I got a VPN account but there seems to no difference between when it's on or off, so whats the point in trying to cheat with a VPN?

But what are you using it for? It won't cure slowdowns caused by congestion only slowdowns caused by traffic shaping. They were also a useful defence against ACS law before they got drummed out of the brownies because they concealed the end user IP in torrent swarms, I imagine most kiddie fiddlers will be using them too for concealment and as a proxy to avoid the IWFfilters all UK ISPs operate.

Shaping (if it is configured correctly and I'm not convinced that VM's is) will selectively slow down P2P traffic and that includes upstream seeding. If the P2P (or news) is tunnelled through a VPN then it will not be detected by the shaping kit and so not slowed down. The result of that is that a 100Mbps VM customer could use 10Mbps of upstream 24x7. The new traffic management reduces that but not nearly enough IMO. The local upstream pipe shared by a couple of hundred users or more has a capacity of 18Mbps so the likely result will be upstream congestion and that will limit the achievable downstream speeds. It will also cause severe jitter and maybe packet loss too as shown in the TBB monitor above.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

All that will fix it is hard limits

30 Meg, 100GB per month
60 Meg, 250GB per month
100/120 Meg, 600GB per month

No funny traffic management, just plain limits. That way people can't cheat with VPN's etc.

Alas the war with Sky and BT Retail, means it won't happen, until both of them also blink.

comcast shaping ignores protocol so VPNs wont bypass it, however I agree with you, the only 2 fixes will be either a hard usage cap or investment in capacity for that UBR port.

Although remembering they narrow pipes my proposed limits would be nearer.

20/30mbit - 50gig
60mbit -110 gig
100/120mbit - 250gig

Edited by Chrysalis (Tue 24-Apr-12 20:15:07)