Virgin Media 1 - Customer 0

Are anyone else being totally and completely f**ked around by VM? (I tried to keep it clean, but when it comes to VM they bring out all my rage).

In Nov 2011 I started getting awful speeds, high pings and packet loss all day everyday. They'd tell me it'd be fixed in Feb... In Feb they told me it had been put off till May, in May they told me it would be fixed in Aug, in Aug they told me it'd be fixed in Nov... suprisingly in November it was actually fixed. I was on 50 meg at the start of it all but to try and "fix" the low speeds they bumped me to 100 meg at some point, it didn't make a difference but they left it since they were doubling everyones speeds anyway.

So, after having my internet restored in Nov 12 I started noticing problems again in Feb 13. I rang up and spoke to your average faults department employee who said their was a high utilization fault and it would be fixed in March. So, beginning of April I rang up to see if it was fixed and spoke to a helpful fellow, who said that the fault was still there and had a new ETA Fix Date of June 13. But, he said in his honest opinion he has seen this situation before (and so have I, last year) and it usually takes a lot longer for VM to fix their problems and I'd be looking around an actual ETA Fix of September. He also recommended dropping to 30 meg package as I probably won't see more than that until the fault is fixed. He also said that, "I'm on a server with 140 other people and at most times during the day 94% of the bandwidth is being used which is unusually high" - Now I've never worked for an ISP so don't know about those servers but I'm aware of the common knowledge that VM oversubscribe their networks.

Now, one thing to notice he also mentioned that I probably wouldn't see 100 meg for more than a few hours a day and that is why he recommended downgrading. But all throughout yesterday I was running speed tests, both using TBB (I'll post image at the bottom) and Speedtest.net... the average I would say was around 9 meg with the max on speedtest being 9.05. These tests were between 2pm and 4am and even at 4am I couldn't get more than 10 meg. Sometimes it is so bad that I can't even watch a youtube video in 480p without it buffering every 5 seconds, even the speedtests often fail because they can't complete the initial ping/latency test.

I've rang and spoke to VM today and downgraded to 30 meg, but if they can't even give me 10 meg I'll be ringing each month and only paying 1/3 of my bill. The dilema I'm having is that the only other ISP's I can get in my area can only provide an estimated 6 meg connection, so don't really want to switch. If BT had infinity in my area I would have switched over a year ago, but they don't even have any rollout plans for my area which I think is weird. They don't have any rollout plans for the exchange close to the city centre either but all the other areas are already accepting orders.

TBB Speed Test:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/13656...

can you use http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping and maybe http://f8lure.mouselike.org as well

what are your modem stats like (upstream and downstream power levels) http://192.168.100.1 (top right status if your on the super hub as you likely are) and what is you upload speed

on the upstream do you have 2 upstream channels or only 1, if you only have 1 that will be your issue that the upstream is maxed out on the channel ID your on, the only fix will come when they turn on dual channel upload (your download speeds are been affected by the upload that is high utilization that is making download go slow due to packet loss or high ping)

but as noted it not be the download speed that is slow its the upload speed that is giving you all the issues and buffering issues will be due to packet loss on the upstream, until your area is upgraded to dual upstream channels, BT is the only way to resolve this issue or tell every person who lives around you to stop using P2P software as its braking the network

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/1489f0a98e2...

Above is the live graph, it actually seems quite good today my minimum ping is usually a very straight line around 17-18 ms but it has actually been fluctuating down to about 15ms. I have been disconnected from games and have been rubberbanding on occasion, that'll most likely be the packet loss.

Downsteam has 5 channels DS1 - DS-5, power levels are 4.3, 4.7, 4.5, 4.3 and 4.2 respectively.
I have 2 upstream channels US-1 and US-2, power levels are 50.3 dBmV and 51.5 dBmV respectively.

The upload speed I had was 5 meg (but as you can see from the TBB speed test I'm getting about 1.5). The 120 meg package is supposed to have 12 meg upload but they haven't increased peoples speeds yet, they'll probably do that in September when they do work on their network.

when is the lat time you rebooted the no so superhub as well are you using it in modem mode or router

if the wireless is used a lot or the router has been on for some time you get incorrect ping results in BQM after some time (ramping pings) your router looks like its in the broken ping state

like this superhub http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/de13752a7ba...
(i rebooted it at 0:22 the day of this post you see ping is now normal again after the red bit as that was the router rebooting)

compared to this http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/d3964096eba... one that is quite bad (does not affect normal traffic thought just the ping starts to go slow)

Edited by leexgx (Fri 12-Apr-13 02:23:47)

I've rebooted them yesterday and today. The superhub has modem mode disabled... just so you know my setup, I have an ethernet from Superhub Port 1 going into my Killer Xeno Pro Network Card and another ethernet from Superhub Port 2 going to a netgear router (I don't have the energy to look up the model at the moment) but the settings are all good, I've been using the settings for years and I have no problem getting high speeds when VM's network is up for it.

Speedtest from when I got my speed "doubled" to 120 Meg:
http://speedtest.net/result/2395067024.png

The wireless is barely used, I have my phone connected to the wifi, but other than that it's only really used when my sister comes round with her laptop.

P.s. I've just restarted both the superhub and router again, will have to wait a while to see if the BQM is affected at all (the graph I linked was live, so you should be able to see it using the original link)

Looking at the BQM (I restarted superhub & router at about 4am), but at about 3pm the internet cut off and the minimum latency seemed to reset itself but I got a ton of packet loss and I can barely load webpages or anything.

I tried to run speedtest.net, I'd always get low pings between 5-15 and a download speed between 2-9 mb/s but the upload would often fail and tell me to retry the test again. One of the tests finally finished to give me a result, but a result I'm a little confused by:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2641335773.png

How can I have an upload speed of exactly zero?

Also, I've just looked @ SuperHub stats again and I now only have 1 downstream channel power level -9.2 and 1 upstream channel power level 50.5 with 13 T3 Timeouts. Where did my other 4 downstream channels and 2nd upstream channel disappear to? O.o

Edited by deleted (Fri 12-Apr-13 18:59:09)

Try our test http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html it will give you graphs of the throughput which auto scale so even if small speeds we should get something

I've tried it a few times today, I usually can't get past stage 2/3.

After your post I tried again, just for good measure, after about 10 minutes or so it is still on stage 3 saying "Please wait this will take a second"

I spoke to VM and they said there was a different fault in the area, just affected my road and that an engineer was working to fix the problem by 9:25 pm. Still had no luck running the test so restarted the superhub and PC and it's actually managed to complete a test now.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/13658...

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2641804880.png

the upload test coming back as 0 is likely it failed to run the upload test

this does not typical virgin media congestion as its too Flat on Both tests and why have you got 2 routers or is the other device an 4-8 port Switch (the superhub is an router/modem)

as you're getting 10mb down and 1.5mb up (rounded up), thats is your what your superhub set to, in Operation config what speed is it set to on the downstream and upstream, your ping on BQM seems to say it is high utilization thought (lots of yellow and Green is not flat)

or you have set you network card to 10mb or that network card you have got in your pc is rate limiting to speed to 10D / 1.5Up

still even at that speed it should be enough to stream youtube ok as long as there is not any packet loss

Edited by leexgx (Sat 13-Apr-13 19:50:53)