Just before I go...

Been having some pretty unusable broadband from Virgin since before Christmas.
It's not so bad during the day, but in the evenings is basically unusable a lot of the time.

Around February I started running pings. Here's results from my own ping test script (dropped ping gives a negative result, I have been using different versions of the script so sometimes it's a -1 others a -50, basically if the line drops to 0ms it's a dropped ping!):
http://rcmtech.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/pingrespo...
http://rcmtech.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/virgin-pi...
http://rcmtech.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/virgin-pi...

I had to go through all kinds of nonsense on the phone, so gave up there and tried the forums. A fair degree of nonsense there too, so I reverted to the phone. Had my Hub replaced with a SuperHub, no change. SuperHub is more unreliable, been having some very interesting issues with it. Ping responses etc. are the same though.

One of the people I spoke to, think he was a 2nd line, suggested using the Think Broadband ping monitor thing, which basically showed the same thing pinging in as my tests were showing pinging out:
My Broadband Ping
My Broadband Ping
My Broadband Ping
which is pretty messy.

It's apparently an upstream utilisation issue, was told it'd be fixed on 27th March, wasn't. The new date is sometime in May, but I was told by one of the many people I've spoken to that the timescales for fixing this type of issue are two months to a year.

So I basically can't use the internet in the evenings, which is when I (and probably most people) are home from work. "Page cannot be displayed" is common. streaming audio/video is out. We're using our phones as the 3G is faster and works.

TalkTalk are doing a free (well, refunded) phone line install offer at the moment, so I'm thinking I'll just ditch all the VM stuff (phone, TiVo and broadband). I'll still have the coax running to the house so maybe can give them another go in a few years. Have been with them (well, TeleWest originally) since their "Medium" package was 512kbps, no problems until now but this is just a joke.

Until you get the dual channel upgrade not you can do apart from goto ADSL line ,

Or you could knock on everyone's door with an vm box on there wall and ask them to set utorrent to not start up with pc and limit the upload speed to 11 and exit it when you have finished using it as thats why your internet is going slow (the person you're talking to), because every one is uploading soon as they turn the pc on due to auto start it is braking the network

Edited by leexgx (Fri 19-Apr-13 00:42:01)

Even better virgin could update the network so that it could handle the usage.

Other ISPs have all managed this.
You don't see issues like this on BT infinity or Sky fibre for example & these providers are truly unlimited, higher uploads, no traffic management.

Virgin media are a mess in my humble opinion. The superhub speaks volumes about them. It's been terrible for 2 years and is somehow still in use.

if i could get FTTC (2-3 years i maybe Warrington) i would consider it due to no Jitter and no packet loss at all , if VM had not fixed the upstream issue i was close to just getting an ADSL connection just so i can play games even thought i would only get around 1mb on ADSL (go full sky) person next door was not far away from terminating his VM contract (surprised he had not done it an year ago as its been bad for quite some time)

VM is upgrading, soon everyone will have the dual channel upstream that fix 90% of the issues that customers have (other 10% will likely be Power levels on the modem are too high or too low and smaller % mite be fiber network related) there fiber network is fine, its the coax cable /customer side that is the issue, it would be nice if they would do FTTP on Virgin they can do it, but still do new installs with armored coax cable

you should've seen the difference it made on my street when they did turned on 2 channel upgrade for the whole of warrington (for the superhub or 50mb modems), all pings now below 20-30ms now with very small 5ms jitter and no packet loss (apart from mine but that is my own doing, think it is time to get the superhub But in modem mode as i ant using it as an router) it just shows that download speeds on virgin are not the issue its the upstream that is the issue as to why they still have an 75% cut down on upstream, (really what should happen is every ones upstream should be shaped the higher the load so at peak time everybody's connection should drop in speed like Openreach do with their QOS on hot backbone lines to prevent packet loss)

what i wish VM would not do or India "Technicolour" support would Stop doing is when a Node is overloaded is offer a Free upgrade on speed to make the customer happy when infact it makes the problem worse as an whole for every one who is connected to that FTTN Node, what they should be doing is Drop everybody's upload speed speed down to 1-2mb untill they fix the issue, i would prefer slow upload speed then a broken connection due to packet loss

as in other post i made if they moved the FTTN nodes to the street level and not use repeaters (or limit their use) but that probably cost them more then what BT is doing right now to implement

Edited by leexgx (Fri 19-Apr-13 04:22:36)

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

Even better virgin could update the network so that it could handle the usage.

Other ISPs have all managed this.
You don't see issues like this on BT infinity or Sky fibre for example & these providers are truly unlimited, higher uploads, no traffic management.

Virgin media are a mess in my humble opinion. The superhub speaks volumes about them. It's been terrible for 2 years and is somehow still in use.

2 reasons VM cant get on top of this (based on my knowledge).

1 - VM are financially weaker than both BT and sky. So upgrading is less affordable to them as it is to those other 2 companies.
2 - The nature of how capacity is shared on docsis makes this situation harder to manage, on sky eg. it would not be unusual for users to be sharing a gigabit pipe on their local exchange and looking at some posts on the sky forum it seems even 10gigabit pipes may be used now. Whilst VM are limited to much narrower pipes, especially on the upstream side. This effectively means 20:1 contention on sky's infrastructure will yield superior results to 20:1 on VMs infrastructure because of statistical contention.

Of course I am not defending VM, their technical staff will also be aware of this and I am sure there is ways to provide a better service than they do but simply they have chosen not to. Also this speed race between broadband providers even worse is that VM have often engineered the race by upping their speeds first making others follow suit. So in affect VM have engineered their own problems. eg. how good would the VM service be now if they did the docsis upgrades they have done in the past 3 years but still had 50/1.5 as the top tier product at £50. In that case 40/10 would still likely be BT's premium product.

Edited by Chrysalis (Fri 19-Apr-13 06:46:12)

Which goes around to the circular debates I was involved in back in 1999 about which is beter ADSL or cable, when the architectures and how contention was managed were a big issue in US at the time.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

In that case 40/10 would still likely be BT's premium product.

Possibly but that upgrade cost BT nothing - they just started out with a conservative profile. The change didn't involve any engineering work sfaik. Echoes of their original ADSL rollout with fixed speeds on very conservative limits for the attenuation. Just how conservative those artificial imitations were became obvious when they launched RADSL later and lines they wouldn't sell 512Kbs to were working at multiple Mbps.

cost nothing probably not, they still would have had to bump up capacity to support those speeds. Then there was the change to profile 17a which would have required testing and software changes, whilst not huge amounts of money compared to rolling out infrastructure I wouldnt say it was free.

I dont think it was that conservative either, I believe BT were planning to stick to 40/10 for longer than they did but their hand was forced by VMs changes. There is a fair few lines that cant manage 40/10 suggesting 40/10 wasnt that conservative. The only reason they get away with marketing 80/20 is due to a soft touch ASA.

If i ran a network and I had no competition pressure, I would deliberatly choose to not run things close to capacity, including local loop limits. Its just common sense as it lowers fault reports for a start. In the days of 512kbit adsl I expect a line could limp along on one leg and still comfortably be in sync.