Crawley Customer's Wanted!

I'm currently looking for as many users of Virgin Media's Cable Broadband services in the Crawley, West Sussex area as possible.

The reason or this is to gather speed test and connection quality results as well as feedback to use as evidence against Virgin Media to push them to fix Utilisation and other Network issues faster as the last promised fix date of Wednesday 12th November 2014 has now seems to of been pushed back to Wednesday 18th February 2015.

If you are using Virgin Media services just outside of Crawley then please use this link to check if your on the Crawley network.

You will get a result similar to the following if you are:

Full Masked Host: cpcxx-crawx-x-x-cust***.croy.cable.virginm.net

uBR: crawx-x-x

Location: Crawley (craw)

x will be a number.

Regards.
Matt.

Edited by mlmclaren (Mon 10-Nov-14 09:40:59)

If they can run the tests on http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html or http://labs.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest then we will be able to do the checking and aggregation into Virgin Media areas for you. e.g.

We now split out the cable areas for the specific purpose you want, so results for each month are available shortly after the start of each month, and can compare with other areas.

Jul 2014 Median 45.4 Mbps
Aug 2014 Median 50.1 Mbps
Sept 2014 Median 29.7 Mbps
Oct 2014 Median 37.4 Mbps

Volume is such that you cannot be sure of the figures, but looking above the Virgin Media National result so far.

I was going to recommend using both TBB and Ooklas test sites.

So you could pull results for just RH postcodes from TBB Speed test separately to Virgin on a whole, this would help against Virgin though its more about getting more customers complaining about the time its taking.

Virgin have already said they know theres an issue and everyone is running slow.

We look at Virgin tests and analyse the reverse DNS to decide which cable area the test was done in. Postcodes are still needed to increase our confidence and for the map plotting of course.

So do you have figures there currently to say what the average download and upload speeds in Crawley RH11 are?

I've just setup a group called The Crawling Crawley Project and plan to get as many customers as possible to air their views and post supporting evidence (speedtests, BQM's)

Hopefully it will just be a community post for people to have a rant and give Virgin a headache all the way to the end, at which point confirm everything is well and delete the whole thing.

We do and will post in morning, sample size at the low confidence end

OK cheers.

Two images, one for those who gave a postcode and host also links to Crawley. Inconclusive proof of a dip in speeds, mainly down to variation in numbers of people testing and varying products. Nationally though the trend is visible and is a repeatable pattern. The big increase in 2014 is real and fits in exactly with the roll-out of the latest upgrades but looks like after a spike usage has grown on the network and congestion is kicking in.

Thanks for that, so basically Virgin has give everyone the huge boost of speed and then the network has a kicking because of it, and issues I'm seeing are being repeated across UK just that Crawley is one of the worst affected networks.

Well can kind of understand why they are dragging there heels then if its happening everywhere.

You share cable bandwidth with an area of probably no more than 500 homes just FYI, not the whole of Crawley.

Yes I'm aware of that but it's the whole Crawley network that is over utilized, confirmed by Virgin and also other Crawley customers.

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

Yes I'm aware of that but it's the whole Crawley network that is over utilized, confirmed by Virgin and also other Crawley customers.

The links between Crawley and the rest of the world seem fine.

http://ukinternetreport.co.uk/cmts/details.php?area=...

The delay to February appears to relate to a node that's been split and requires some more work, not to work on Crawley as a whole.

If the entire area were in strife I'd expect a ton of complaints all over the Internet. There are 7 CMTS in Crawley, 5 old school uBRs and 2 x Motorola BSRs, one of which is a 'relatively' new addition. I would imagine that customers will be migrated to that guy when it's good to go, if they haven't already.

Crawley 6 had capacity upgrade on its backhaul to switch it from 2 sets of 4 x gigabit Ethernet to 2 x 10 gigabit Ethernet.

I'm sure some staffer or field engineer told you there were problems all over Crawley nonetheless.

I appreciate what you are saying and can agree there has been some upgrades that have given the network a boost but at the same these boosts can only be appreciated during the day as when evening comes the service is reduce down to to slow speeds and is delicate still.

I understand that network upgrades aren't exactly as easy as adding RAM to a PC but surely they shouldn't be taking so long considering how long these issues have been affecting Crawley customers.

The whole area isn't in strife but customers will not be getting the full service they pay for, whether or not they know it or not is another question, I've found at least another 3 people on Virgin's forum who are in Crawley with the same issues.

Field technicians and even areas managers over the years have been saying that as well as utilization issues there is upgrades required to local equipment like the cabinets, This mainly because the cabinets are fulling apart, they over heat in the summer to easy and many flood in the rainy seasons.

Also how are you getting this information?

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

There are 7 CMTS in Crawley, 5 old school uBRs and 2 x Motorola BSRs, one of which is a 'relatively' new addition. I would imagine that customers will be migrated to that guy when it's good to go, if they haven't already.

So a craw07 ubr should be appearing soon then... and I know you said that craw06 had an upgrade done but why would the service get worst and also I notice upstream bandwidth is now affected where it was perfect this time last week.

PS. I would assume that the first Moto BSR is craw06 then.

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

So a craw07 ubr should be appearing soon then... and I know you said that craw06 had an upgrade done but why would the service get worst and also I notice upstream bandwidth is now affected where it was perfect this time last week.

PS. I would assume that the first Moto BSR is craw06 then.

Name: craw-cmts-07.network.virginmedia.net
Address: 82.7.207.21

8 12 ms 11 ms 12 ms popl-bb-1c-ae9-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.159.118]
9 11 ms 13 ms 12 ms croy-core-2b-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [81.96.226.6]
10 13 ms 12 ms 13 ms craw-cmts-07.network.virginmedia.net [82.7.207.21]

No-one said the node split was your node. Crawley 6 serves a fair area. The fix date probably applies to a few areas and is a result of a larger upgrade programme.

Edited by deleted (Mon 17-Nov-14 18:40:57)

So craw07 is active then, how would one get assigned to it, I know it would envolve my WAN's MAC address changing.

I know you didn't say the node split was on craw06, I was talking about the upgrades done on craw06 so 2x 4x 1gbit to 2x 10gbit.

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

So craw07 is active then, how would one get assigned to it, I know it would envolve my WAN's MAC address changing.

I know you didn't say the node split was on craw06, I was talking about the upgrades done on craw06 so 2x 4x 1gbit to 2x 10gbit.

It would involve your WAN IP address changing. Your WAN MAC address is burned into the circuit board of your Superhub.

The upgrades were indeed on Crawley 6 however they were to avoid capacity issues on the WAN side of the CMTS, they would have no bearing at all on any local access network capacity issues.

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

It would involve your WAN IP address changing. Your WAN MAC address is burned into the circuit board of your Superhub.

The upgrades were indeed on Crawley 6 however they were to avoid capacity issues on the WAN side of the CMTS, they would have no bearing at all on any local access network capacity issues.

I'm aware of that and I'm also aware that changing the WAN MAC Adress on my Router (LRT224) will also change my IP, I have done this once already and got moved to a different segment of craw06 though that wasn't much better.

So do you think if I change my router MAC Address a few times it will eventually be asigned to the new uBR?

Oh OK well that would explain why nothing really changed much then, only thing I have noticed changed is after midnight the net doesn't just grind to a half any more.

Well there's been some new downstream channels added on network and I've seen 4-6 of them,

The cabinet has also been given a bit of a refurb and clear-out of dead cables to drop interference and noise, news taps (unfortunately same old knackered combiner)

The guys doing it suggested I get repull done as my Telephone and Cable services are on different drops and the signals are all hot based on the lengths to my house from cabinet.

Speed is improved at peak times now see average of about 35 instead of 7and more work is scheduled on Friday and Monday coming.

Nice to see Virgin out and about recently.

Now repeat after me what Virgin Media tells the world - cable is not affected by distance

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Now repeat after me what Virgin Media tells the world - cable is not affected by distance

Yeah Exactly, Though kicks Openreache's [censored] but I suppose copper hairs aren't exactly the future

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Now repeat after me what Virgin Media tells the world - cable is not affected by distance

Doesn't slow down the further you get from cabinet. Sounds like the chap is on the wrong tap.

By this metric FTTP is also affected by distance as too far from the OLT or too close to it and you have issues

My speeds are fine (not factoring utilisation issues of course), seems like I might have some issues with drop cable to house...

It wouldn't surprise me as it was being drove over repeatedly for around the first 2-3 months due to bad repeal job.

Currently on lowest tap and using attenuator and signals are quite high without attenuator.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Now repeat after me what Virgin Media tells the world - cable is not affected by distance

By this metric FTTP is also affected by distance as too far from the OLT or too close to it and you have issues

Well I wouldn't say you could compare Virgin to an FTTP product, the reason FTTC has issues over distance is because the copper phone lines are no good a transmitting the higher frequencies and whilst coaxial can cope with higher frequencies it too will struggle over distance in the future when higher frequencies are needed.

Though that is some time away and will not be as huge an impact!

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

Well I wouldn't say you could compare Virgin to an FTTP product, the reason FTTC has issues over distance is because the copper phone lines are no good a transmitting the higher frequencies and whilst coaxial can cope with higher frequencies it too will struggle over distance in the future when higher frequencies are needed.

Though that is some time away and will not be as huge an impact!

Which is why VM's network is amplified.

That's true, I forgot that.