How's the service Woolwich/Plumstead Area?

hi! I've been thinking to sign up for VM FO broadband only package but what is holding me off is their speed throttling and issue with so called over utilisation. also seen plenty of complain on their services. now can existing VM FO users in Plumstead/Woolwich area can share their experience with me in terms of connection, speed and reliability?

the over utilisation is at the street level not network wide {normaly} (ok within 5 streets around you ish) so it not help you if some one says its ok where they are as you could be 200 yards away and be on an different FTTN node and could be over utilisation on the upstream so packet loss, you need to ask around your street (nock nock )

ideally you need to ask some one on the same street and monitor there connection for about an week or monitor it over the week end (Friday to Monday best time to monitor as higher peak time use) use BQM monitor http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/monitors.html and http://f8lure.mouselike.org

if they not let you monitor the connection just ask does you-tube or on-line gaming work ok around 6pm

Edited by leexgx (Sat 16-Mar-13 03:54:18)

That's the sort of answer I give but there is one situation where the answer can be relied on - if somebody says their postcode area is oversubscribed there is every likelihood that all parts of that area will be poor.

VERY bad lately

Had to fight quite hard during 2011 to get the optimisations and noise-busters out which finally delivered 48 Meg on 50 Meg service 7 times out of 10 mid-2012.

Around xmas when they did the upgrade to 100 Meg I saw 97 Meg over a few days.

Since the New Year however I would say 3 to 4 Meg download is now the norm unless it's the middle of the working day. Someone is caning the service somewhere.

Should add that I think the service is Virgin's main Internet rather than local utilisation. Think Broadband and speedtest.net download speeds correlates with download from real internet sites; or multi-threaded download using Virgin's recommended large-file approach is typically around 5 Meg max.

http://www.virginmedia.com/testmyspeed/manual.php

BT Wholesale and BT retail speed test on the other hand normally reads high 70s; even on Wifi. 90+ on Ehternet connection so I presume that uses a single large file that virgin has cached somewhere.

Therefore I think the problem is at further up the stream, closer to the internet if you will and not a local utilisation issue.

Chris

Edited by deleted (Sun 24-Mar-13 22:28:57)

In reply to a post by chrisdack:

Should add that I think the service is Virgin's main Internet rather than local utilisation.

Cable's Achilles heel is always local congestion because of the low bandwidth of the local pipes. Until very recently there were only 4 downstreams and one upstream anywhere - that's 200Mbps down and 18Mbps up serving maybe a couple of hundred customers. VM were selling 100Mbps down and 10Mbps up on that. More recently you may well see 8 down and 2 up but that's still only 400/36 and it doesn't take many torrent freaks to cripple that.

If it were VM's core network to blame everybody would be seeing the sort of speeds you do and I for one certainly don't - for the most part I get the speeds they sold me. That has not always been so in the past and may not be so in the future of course.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Mon 25-Mar-13 08:43:51)

if your talking about the fibre side of the FTTN cab i would not agree with you (as i have never seen fibre over utilisation before, always been on the coax side upstream)

sounds your talking about the coax DOCSIS side of the cab that feeds down to the smaller street cabs, (no one should be getting 10mb up unless they have dual channel upload and the cab has been upgraded, if they do they also get 120mb normaly)

the whole of Warrington just get dual channel upload enabled, most of my ping monitors are now mostly normal now, they was about to lose 7 customers in the next 2-3 months if they had not done that, as packet loss was getting quite bad (VM need to traffic shape the upload on users who are uploading constantly between 4pm and midnight)

it be nice if VM would move the FTTN cabs to the street level then this congestion issue would go away (but i guess that would cost a lot of money) i guess they could add more upstream channel hardware at the node or split the cab more often when load gets to 70-80% at peak time

Edited by leexgx (Mon 25-Mar-13 03:08:27)

In reply to a post by leexgx:

if your talking about the fibre side of the FTTN cab i would not agree with you (as i have never seen fibre over utilisation before, always been on the coax side upstream)

Yes the DOCSIS side of things which carries both upstream and downstream channels on the coax. I believe that the fibre back from the optical node to the CMTS is actually still DOCSIS - the laser driving the fibre is modulated with the RF frequencies carrying the data.

In reply to a post by leexgx:

no one should be getting 10mb up unless they have dual channel upload and the cab has been upgraded, if they do they also get 120mb normaly)

The original 100Mbps product was 100/10 - double the 50/5 product. If you had that I think you still get it although all the new 100Mbps customers and doubled 50Mbps ones will get 100/5

I notice I typed 8 down 10 up as the current best which I've now corrected to 8/2

Edited by kwikbreaks (Mon 25-Mar-13 08:47:32)

there are aprox 110 downstream channels (5500mb/s down aprox) and 4 upstream channels (110mb/s up aprox) not sure if its 5 or 4 upstreams, not 8 down and 1 or 2 up as what your thinking there is (that is just what the modem uses)

(note there could be more upstream channels and down stream channels just in Warrington i have never seen it go past 0-110 down or 0-3 up channel ID's seems to be standard how it is set-up)

the 2 channel up is so it can load balance between them (like the down stream works but with 6-8 down) where as before the single channel upstream was getting overloaded at peak time by some users on the same channel (mostly p2p at peak time on system boot up set to unlimited speed)

if you look at my BQM monitor in my sig you can see the first 5-7 monitors are now for the most part Post DOCSIS 3 ping normal now (this is what my Virgin line looked like before i got shoved onto DOCSIS 3 3-4 years ago, as my connection and the others on wa41nx has been rubbish on DOCSIS3 now for the most part the Dual channel upsteam seems to have fixed the upstream congestion)

Edited by leexgx (Thu 28-Mar-13 00:15:55)