Packet loss

How much is this a problem for virgin cable users? I am contemplating switching to virgin - mainly to benefit from the high speeds - But wanted to make sure that packet loss and latency are at an acceptable level before I take the plunge.

Awful - check out their forums.

If it's online gaming you're thinking of then avoid.

It depends where you are, and how many of your neighbours are fighting over the local bandwidth. There are some here who say to avoid Virgin, but where I live (DN4) I've had no problems since I first had cable installed in the 90's under Bradford Cable.

I recently had the speed upgrade from 10Mb to 20Mb, a change of modem, and I get a constant 19.0/1.1 or better.

My Broadband Ping

Those are from today, the peaks on the graph will be file transfers, where I've sent data to my niece. Seems OK to me.

There was an article in the news feed of this website a couple of months ago that stated VM had the worst latency\jitter issues out of all those surveyed.

Remember this... VM are going for headline speeds NOT Quality Of Service.

In reply to a post by drummerjohn:

Remember this... VM are going for headline speeds NOT Quality Of Service.

That deserves repeating so I will do so.. (in bold)

Remember this... VM are going for headline speeds NOT Quality Of Service.

Thanks for all your replies - I lam presently with Be who have very good customer support and a decent quality of broadband service. The main issue is I am restricted to around 12mbps. Also, My line conditions are not great - with intermittent low level packet loss. But given your feedback and the overral impression of reading posts on their forum, I think I might be better staying where I am

Don't be put off by a few people who are very vocal about the very real issues they are experiencing.
Do have a look at the VM forums as well as here to get an idea of the sort of problems people do get and how well they are resolved.
But do remember that VM provide broadband services to many thousands of people and only those few who have issues tend to post to boards like this.
I used to be a Demon customer which is why I still hang around here, and it is always good to see what is going on anyway.
I've been with VM for a few years now and just upgraded to their 100/5 package which is running very well (my TBB Quality Monitor shows a very level graph and PS3/Xbox gaming is great) though I was disappointed to only get 100/5 rather than 100/10, just because I ordered after they realigned their products. (My 100/5 is apparently their old 50/5 package with download doubled and upload to be doubled later this year rather than the old 100/10 package which you can no longer get.)
Probably best to check when you order what speeds, both up and down, you'll get.

Thanks I will bear that in mind - ultimately if I decide to go for higher speeds, Virgin is my only option, as my line goes directly to exchange and BT infinity is not an option. Furthermore I live in Chelsea, where the council has refused BT permit ion to instal cabinets - claiming that they are not in keeping with character of the borough. Enough to make you cry!

Edited by deleted (Wed 27-Jun-12 16:27:33)

In reply to a post by Daemon66:

Don't be put off by a few people who are very vocal about the very real issues they are experiencing.
Do have a look at the VM forums as well as here to get an idea of the sort of problems people do get and how well they are resolved.
But do remember that VM provide broadband services to many thousands of people and only those few who have issues tend to post to boards like this.

That sums it up well - the people complaining on forums are the ones with problems - very rare you hear form people who are happy with their service.re, more so when someone says "you only have to look at the forums to see how many are complaining..." Totally unbalanced.

Yes, every provider has areas of bad service, due to local problems. Quite often this is the users, downloading Gigabytes of stuff, running streaming services - there's only so much you can shove down one bit of fibre at a time and it's not always split fairly to give everyone on that node an equal amount.

Where I live is a major town, I'm in a densely populated area with lots of cable customers, but I'm not being affected by poor service. Check with neighbours, do they have cable broadband? If so, what do their speed tests show? Asking Virgin will only get the answer "up to xx mbps", they will not say "you WILL get xx mbps".

You'll find many users of an ISP have slower connections than they should get but don't notice the slowness because they don't game or download huge files.

Also, not everyone with issues will have registered with a forun like this and will just live with it or call the ISP and hopefully get their issue fixed.

For me packet loss was so bad I ended up having to leave VM and find a FTTC supplier.
Some evenings it was over 95% packet loss, you could barely get 100kbits/sec.

Yes I'd agree that only people with a problem are likely to go to the VM forum (or here) to complain about it, but instead of looking at the number of posts as a reflection of their overall service, look at how well you think each problem was resolved by a member of the VM support team.
If you get a fantastic connection, you'll never need to contact them, but if you don't then this might indicate the level of support you can expect and if you would be happy with it.

I'd always find the forum support team to be quite reasonable in following all the threads and trying to investigate where possible, but a lot of the issues for me (and my area) are utilisation based and the stock answer is usually "I have checked your local network segment and I can see that your local UBR was suffering from very high load. If this continues, we will raise this over to our network team for further investigation."

I had VM for just over a year, the first three months were perfect, months 4-6 were terrible with high load, high packet loss. This was then fixed for months 7-9 and then went back to bad again.
In the good periods I could get the full 50mb down / 5mb up on speed tests, which probably makes it feel more disappointing when it doesn't work as you've seen it work so well.

I personally wouldn't use VM again as I need a bit more reliability, but I used to recommend them to everyone (in the NTL branded days - circa 2003/4) and I felt like the only one singing their praises when everyone else said they were awful, so I've been on both sides of the fence.

Don't they still have a trial period where you can cancel if you're not happy in the first month?

Hmmmm

In reply to a post by drws:

I had VM for just over a year, the first three months were perfect, months 4-6 were terrible with high load, high packet loss. This was then fixed for months 7-9 and then went back to bad again.

In reply to a post by drws:

Don't they still have a trial period where you can cancel if you're not happy in the first month?

I think I've spotted a slight flaw in your logic there...

I know, right PITA it was to have it break after the trial period.
Hopefully the OP will have more luck if they go with VM, as some people seem to get a very good connection.

The problem with cable is that it is very very area specific. The local pipes are tiny 200Mbps down in most areas with a maximum of 400Mbps Upstream is just 18Mbps. Those pipes service 200+ users so if you get a torrent freak on the old unlimited 100/10 package using a VPN or otherwise evading the shaping it can be very bad news for all thier neighbours. I'm sure this is why things can go downhill so quickly.

I was going to give VM the elbow but got messed around by Openreach - 3 weeks wait on install which was a no-show and then given a date 3 weeks later so I risked an upgrade to VM XL60 - it was only £2.50 more than 10Mbps and is working OK right now. 12 month contract though so could have been a bad move.

My concern with Openreach was that I left BT for cable because they failed to fix a line fault. Given 3 week lead times on install work where would I stand on faults which I fear could be quite likely.

Thanks for all your responses. What I have garnered is that it's very variable and area
specific; and virigin customer support leaves a lot to be desired. So the critical question is what will the overall level of quality and speed be like down my particular street. I will try to find out but those neighbours I know are not very broadband savvy- to say the least

Just get their IP address and set up a TBB BQM on it.

Also to note, there have been numerous national monitoring programmes based on dedicated hardware that have shown VM to have higher packet loss on average, across the country. This of course, is having taken any personal opinion or "forum complainers" bias out of the equation.

In reply to a post by qasdfdsaq:

Also to note, there have been numerous national monitoring programmes based on dedicated hardware that have shown VM to have higher packet loss on average, across the country. This of course, is having taken any personal opinion or "forum complainers" bias out of the equation.

Yes, this is hard data. Samknows is one monitoring programme that has Ofcom involved; there are others.