Bye bye VM

Had enough - 8 months of broadband hell and jumping through hoops with support staff that don't even understand basic networking.

Worst ISP in my 13 years of broadband.

What broke the camels back?

Got a letter stating my service would be disrupted on 5th Feb for essential network maintenance.

After that if I even upload any more than 10kbps my connection just fails.

The VM staff have been told to ignore the Total Broadband graph links posted by users which is why the forum stopped users from posting images directly into threads.

Ah well - that's £59 saved a month (inc TiVO).

was the camels back ever ok?

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

was the camels back ever ok?

Thanks - that made me chuckle.

The Mrs still chuckles at me in a condescending manner every where year when its time to renew / change provider for being with VM back in 2006.

In reply to a post by drummerjohn:

The VM staff have been told to ignore the Total Broadband graph links posted by users which is why the forum stopped users from posting images directly into threads.

hi,

the reason why the image feature has been removed from certain groups is due to the security threat that virgin has previously, they have removed certain features from certain groups but the pro ranks have got all the features (i know because i am on the vm forums) look me up swt4ajp

In reply to a post by pcoventry76:

So they know how bad it is to the point they have been told to ignore our graphs!?

Shocking!

Mines been okay but in the last 24 hours I've started to get a graph that's horrible. And I can only see more coming!

Hi,

Virgin forum staff have not been told to ignore the graphs at all, even though they have the tools to diagnose the connection they do also look at the thinkbroadband graphs.

In reply to a post by swt4ajp:

In reply to a post by pcoventry76:

So they know how bad it is to the point they have been told to ignore our graphs!?

Shocking!

Mines been okay but in the last 24 hours I've started to get a graph that's horrible. And I can only see more coming!

Hi,

Virgin forum staff have not been told to ignore the graphs at all, even though they have the tools to diagnose the connection they do also look at the thinkbroadband graphs.

Evrytime a refer them to the TB graph they ignore it and state that you have to do pings to bbc.co.uk and speedtests. I have even asked them to comment on why they don't make any reference to TB graphs and they will not comment on it. No comment means they have been not to acknowledge.

Also that issue you speak of was over 9 months ago and Lithium issued a fix. Again, it doesn't take a genius to work out that it works in their favour for users not to be able to post the TB graphs. Ahh.. I remember the sea of graphs that were plagued with Red.

Here you go... upload of 100kbps (10kbps would do it was well) max was doing this...
TB VM

Nothing wrong apparently. My BT Infinity is lovely on the other hand. Thank god I have (had) both.

Edited by deleted (Wed 20-Feb-13 21:06:37)

In reply to a post by drummerjohn:

Evrytime a refer them to the TB graph they ignore it and state that you have to do pings to bbc.co.uk and speedtests. I have even asked them to comment on why they don't make any reference to TB graphs and they will not comment on it. No comment means they have been not to acknowledge.

Also that issue you speak of was over 9 months ago and Lithium issued a fix. Again, it doesn't take a genius to work out that it works in their favour for users not to be able to post the TB graphs. Ahh.. I remember the sea of graphs that were plagued with Red.

i know it was fixed but mark and kieren havent re-enabled it yet, for the bottom groups "just joined" and the settled in nicely groups. but everyone else has. and it isnt that hard to leave a link on the post to the tbb graph

In reply to a post by pcoventry76:

I am getting annoyed at the mods and their trigger happy fingers. It seems complaining about bad service is "!against the forum guidlines"

I'm going to have to restart my old website if people's complaints just get smothered over.

I am getting this for 120/12

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2522843908.png

and here's one to Namesco - the one I am told is "the best"

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2522847121.png

I've used 7.8GB all day. Not over utalised my bum!

if you want pm me on the vm forums with what thread it was about and ill get it looked into why they are locking threads and also who the mod was.

Edited by deleted (Wed 20-Feb-13 22:35:02)

i am going to send a pm on here to your account,

as for steam, i have no problem on steam, could you send me a pm with a tracert and ill try to help out as much as i can

Edited by deleted (Wed 20-Feb-13 22:49:30)

the problem is they cant refer a network fault for utilisation unless it breaches the threshold set for high utilisation. Which I think is over 90% utilisation for more than 10% of the time or something similiar to that. If that isnt met then it doesnt matter what the tbb graph looks like they cant escalate it.

The blame lies in the very bad VM network management with the requirement of extremely high utilisation to get relief work done. In that respect VM tech support staff have their hands tied. Remember tech support are not the same people who run the networks.

Also that even when relief work is done its so frequently inadequate as well, maybe just enough to get below 90% but not enough to get a quality service.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 21-Feb-13 12:29:33)

Edited by deleted (Thu 21-Feb-13 12:44:38)

I've seen a coincidence too.

Last week I received a SamKnows monitoing box which started out showing 40-50Mbps on my 60Mbps connection. Yesterday it started showing 60Mbps+. Today the connection has gone from 5 to 8 downstreams.

So have VM got wind of the SamKnows box and waved a magic wand over my connection? No of course not its just coincidence.

Right now my connection is fine for downloading at least - so long as I use a multithread downloader I can max it out at any time I've tried so far (I tend not to use it much during the second STM period anyway).

In my area there is no STM on either this or my previous package until the 4pm - 9pm one. I can download half the internet in the mornings and early afternoon with no penalty. The problem is that everybody else can too with may account for the high jitter I see...

Edited by deleted (Thu 21-Feb-13 16:18:04)

Somebody on either this or more likely cableforum which I no longer use suggested that the CMTS can only handle a relatively small number of STM rules and with so many different packages now they have to leave some rules out...

They will also tell you to use a particular provider on Speedtest - namely Namesco. I would imagine they have an optimised route for that.

Edited by deleted (Thu 21-Feb-13 16:24:16)

Edited by deleted (Thu 21-Feb-13 16:27:18)

Most of the speedtesters use far too small a test file to give a valid result. Some report peak speed too rather than average. The only way to reliably find what your connection can do is to either do concurrent downloads from several sources or use a downloader and source that support multiple connections. Obviously the sources need to be capable of delivering at faster than you can download.

FWIW Speedtest.net Coventry gives me results in line with the 60Mbps package speed most of the time.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Thu 21-Feb-13 16:28:16)

STM affects everything, its a connection wide cap.

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

I've seen a coincidence too.

Last week I received a SamKnows monitoing box which started out showing 40-50Mbps on my 60Mbps connection. Yesterday it started showing 60Mbps+. Today the connection has gone from 5 to 8 downstreams.

So have VM got wind of the SamKnows box and waved a magic wand over my connection? No of course not its just coincidence.

Capacity planning, and slightly late at that. Your connection shouldn't have dropped at all.

Still the conspiracy theory is far more exciting.

It was actually down for close to half an hour.

===

I suppose that the channel increase happened earlier - it was only the outage that made me check the modem. Certainly there is no obvious change in the TBB chart and that 60Mbps I saw was only a 7:00 am hourly figure with daily averages of 44-54Mbps. I do know that with JDownloader I can get the full 60Mbps pretty much any time though.

This was the day of the outage after which I spotted it was on 8 channels - My Broadband Ping

Edited by kwikbreaks (Sat 23-Feb-13 14:51:25)

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

It was actually down for close to half an hour.

===

I suppose that the channel increase happened earlier - it was only the outage that made me check the modem. Certainly there is no obvious change in the TBB chart and that 60Mbps I saw was only a 7:00 am hourly figure with daily averages of 44-54Mbps. I do know that with JDownloader I can get the full 60Mbps pretty much any time though.

This was the day of the outage after which I spotted it was on 8 channels - My Broadband Ping

I meant shouldn't have dropped in performance from maximum ideally. You didn't mention it going out of service at all so I wouldn't have known about that.

Your downstream group probably hit the KPIs for upgrade and the simplest upgrade was to deploy more channels, hardware was either available or easily put in place.

The outage may have been a VM field engineer lining up your local network to accommodate the new downstreams.

Thanks for the info.

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

Thanks for the info.

Don't flatter me it's speculation rather than information, I'm just going by the theory that the simplest explanation is the most likely one!

A guess maybe but more educated than I could make - I'd assumed it was the doubling which is scheduled April to June.

I'd be very interested to see what your guess is on http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/virgin_cable/f/4213... - I've never seen charts like those but I think the solution is to bale out for ADSL.....

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

A guess maybe but more educated than I could make - I'd assumed it was the doubling which is scheduled April to June.

I'd be very interested to see what your guess is on http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/virgin_cable/f/4213... - I've never seen charts like those but I think the solution is to bale out for ADSL.....

Broken Superhub. Replacement needed.

Except he says he's already had a replacement and several engineer visits.

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

Except he says he's already had a replacement and several engineer visits.

Switch wireless off on Superhub. Unplug everything. See if the ping pattern persists.

I got the impression from fault reports that it was mostly connection issues that caused the Superhub to freeze up although hammering the wifi did keel it over on earlier firmware releases. The current firmware worked OK for me but I left the wireless set to 140 and never hammered it. I did eventually move over to modem mode because I needed to use OpenDNS parental controls plus I needed some QoS functionality.

problem is VM make the issue worse by Upgrading users to the Supershub and then Giving them More download and Upload (5mb from 1-2mb)speed that just makes the problem worse

when i had my old 20mb modem i had 0 issues with VM no packet loss very good ping (docsis 1 network) when i got the 50mb v1 and v2 modem, just loads of packet loss (docsis 3) but the first problem i had was with VM network edge issues (there Bandwidth provider was dropping packets so anything inside VM network was fine like the Game download server, but if you went onto the internet site is was [censored] due to Tera Bandwidth provider)

what they need to do is on overloaded Nodes if cap every body's upload to 2mb until they can Fix the local issue, or at least drop users connections down to 2mb if they abuse p2p to much (abuse in the way of leaving the p2p to run on start up as most do set to unlimited upload)

you can see from the monitors below of the issue with overloaded upstream (BQM one) mine is number 1 (lucky the upstream channel i am on is not to bad) ,
the issue ones are 2 and 3 on the same street but they are running on an Upstream channel that is overloaded around 4pm to midnight

wish i could move to where BQM monitor 8 is that's nice pings