Latency Question?

Hi Guys

Right I noticed some latency issues over the last few days and after having a look have found that the latency on my connection and my ubr

I include some shots of the cmts graph over the week and my connection,

CMTS Graph
My Connection

On the CMTS graph I've noticed it risen by around 4ms and I'm not too sure about the BQM but I have noticed the lag in online gaming has become a lot more noticeable since around the same time this change happened.

Now in the past the latency on this CMTS has been at this level but it was reduced to 7ms, so have they put it back up because of the utilisation issues which they are supposedly fixing.

If this is there way of fixing it, I think its a pretty bad one.

Any answers to why this has been done!

Edited by mlmclaren (Tue 06-Jan-15 00:55:36)

Are you saying your latency went from 7ms to 11ms?

Well my ubr (craw06) did yes, my connection "minimum" latency went up by 3ms

My latency varies all the time, seems cable isn't as stable as vdsl2 that I had before.

From what I've found it seems Virgin decided to raise latency at some of its busy or over-utilized CMTS locations around the UK,

I'm not sure whether this is to correct errors and stabilise the network or to lift the pressure on the networks to allow them to perform better.

Either way its had a knock on affect on the minimum latency on my graph that has gone from 14ms to 17ms, before it was 13ms.

However connections I monitor for family members back in Birmingham have had their latency reduced by 1/2ms and that has also reflected on their monitors and they now show a minimum latency of 12ms.

I've had enough anyway and awaiting a call from Zen's sales team to decide the best package for me.

After many years of being a Virgin customer and putting up with their nonsense I finally have an alternative technology to go to and from "brief" tests seems to kick (donkey like behinds) in the stability and reliability department.

Since I raised this issue over on their forums I have been getting the cold shoulder regarding it and with them now saying that the latest estimated fix date has been pulled and no new one has yet been dreamed up by the folks at virgin networks, I've just give up, I've also been told that even after the last bunch of downstream channels that where applied to the network it now seems that more are required...

It's been nearly 2 years now, so it may never end, or not completely anyway.

From your posts over on the VM community I think they'll be glad to see you go. Anyone who complains about a couple of milliseconds of latency and sub 10 ms jitter is just a PITA that they be glad to get rid of.

Since no publicly available games or VOIP services would notice or show any effects from these levels of latency and jitter you are obviously running some very poorly written bespoke software that is affected. Therefore I would suggest you look into buying dedicated fibre links between your sites rather than trying to use any consumer broadband product.

The jitter would vary from 4ms - 47ms and the affected platform was XBOX..

Anyway I'm not getting into it on here as well, You guys obviously go on the figures I have supplied but I can't give you the experience and true affect it is having.

The figure don't look bad, I know that, or most ADSL users would be screwed but I assure you theirs an issue locally beside the utilisation issues and I'm almost sure Virgin must be laughing about it as its hard to prove.

Also what Virgin fails to see is that its not just me leaving, its at minimum 7 accounts and around 16 at max and 5 accounts I know of are top tier packages with all the trimmings, all these accounts have got in writing that they may leave either due to price increase or the utilisation fault.

PS. My complaining about a few milliseconds jitter may be "pathetic" in your eyes but it follows poor customer support, lack of information, ignorant in home support and absolutely no respect for their customers property.

You may like Virgin Media or you might just be restricted to only them due to a lack of alternative infrastructure, but please don't try and make out like I'm the bad guy, I'm the guy who's had enough of [censored] customer service and people being treated like dog [censored] shoe's.

Edited by mlmclaren (Wed 14-Jan-15 10:13:24)

Oh don't get me wrong, VM have a lot of problems: poor turnaround time for overutilisation; poor equipment (Superduds); poor customer services, though forum is generally better than phone support; poor roll-out/investment in CDN nodes; YouTube buffering issues; the list goes on.

I'm lucky that I do actually live in a largely under-utilised area and get good service most of the time - if I didn't I'd be off too (now that FTTC is available to me).

However, your complaint just doesn't add up, sorry but that's the facts. If you are having problems gaming on the Xbox then check your internal wiring first, then check your modem mode superhub is not having line issues, perhaps try a better router, or even bypass the router. From everything you have reported, latency/jitter/routing is not your problem.

Area concerned appears to have high utilisation and very poor peak time performance.

Virgin Media speeds peaked in 2014 some months after the last wave of upgrades started, then seemed to dip, probably showing the roll-out and then once roll-out completed the subsequent utilisation that pushed some areas to the limit,

Annual speed upgrades and capacity uplifts appear the usual pattern now at Virgin Media.

In reply to a post by Daemon66:

However, your complaint just doesn't add up, sorry but that's the facts. If you are having problems gaming on the Xbox then check your internal wiring first, then check your modem mode superhub is not having line issues, perhaps try a better router, or even bypass the router. From everything you have reported, latency/jitter/routing is not your problem.

I know they don't add up and I assure you I've tested everything you have listed and even my internal networking equipment, I've switched the the new SH2ac I had as a replacement since this problem started to and from Modem Mode, and direct connection of xbox to the modem and SH router mode also..

The only definite thing I can say on the matter is that the problems started on the day that the latency on my CMTS increased by 4ms and that passed on a 3ms increase to all my BQM's, my other connections back in Birmingham (Kings Norton CMTS 9 & 10) have shown no increase and before the new year actually had the latency decreased from 7ms to 6ms.

My main gripe with Virgin has been the issues you've mentioned and the disregard for customers oppinions and in 1 case a repair suggestion a technician ignored and then was later found to be correct by another technician.

I'm not saying any other ISP is going to be different, but the fact is Virgin have got worse since Liberty Global takeover and now even less is getting done and even staff in certain departments at Virgin aren't happy with the new owners or management.

Too much cutting costs and boosting profits... They need regulating like the electric companies, I'm sure if my electric was intermittent at peak times I would at least get a f******* letter regarding it.

I've been relaying the information from Virgin Media to the local residents and most questions I ask are their questions and now they grow angry because I'm not getting a reply and can't tell them anything, the only information I have for them now is call cancellations and say balls to anymore discounts and credits.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Area concerned appears to have high utilisation and very poor peak time performance.

Virgin Media speeds peaked in 2014 some months after the last wave of upgrades started, then seemed to dip, probably showing the roll-out and then once roll-out completed the subsequent utilisation that pushed some areas to the limit,

Annual speed upgrades and capacity uplifts appear the usual pattern now at Virgin Media.

This has been an issue on and off constantly for the past 3 years according to my father and other local residents, the latest one didn't seem attached to the upgrades as they didn't happen until November, However Virgin might of been giving the upgrades out early to hush customers complaints.

I don't even know what 'latency' is ... should i be worried??

Latency is the speed at which your connection sends a packet of data to and from a server, you should only be concerned if yours is high and you require it low and stable.

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

From what I've found it seems Virgin decided to raise latency at some of its busy or over-utilized CMTS locations around the UK,

I'm not sure whether this is to correct errors and stabilise the network or to lift the pressure on the networks to allow them to perform better.

It would do none of those and isn't related to local utilisation issues.

Well then why!

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

Well then why!

Traffic engineering for routing optimisation.

Latency is likely not a consideration when deciding 'optimal' routes for these purposes.

Latency is the time it takes for a packet of data to traverse the network between two computers. Note: All internet traffic is broken into little packets of around 1.5KB.

What mlmclaren is actually complaining about here is the ping time. This is actually more than double the latency of the network since it is the time it takes for a simple small packet to get from one computer to another one, plus the time it takes that other computer to process the request , plus the time it takes for the response packet to get back to the start point.

One of the early ways Denial of Service attacks happened was for a server to be flooded with ping requests which meant the server was too busy processing them to do its real job. Thus most servers and network devices limit the number of requests they will respond to, or simply don't respond at all, leading to high ping times even though the network latency is low.

Should you be worried - Nope, so long as you are not having problems with VOIP or gaming then latency is not important to you. It has (almost) no effect on normal web browsing, downloading or video/audio streaming unless it gets really, really long >250ms. VOIP and gaming do benefit from lower latencies though it is still possible to have a good quality VOIP call with someone in Australia or via a satellite link. Real-time gaming however is generally better restricted to a local region where latencies are < 50ms.

This probably explains the Virgin Media experience I had - I noticed the initial launch of a web page seemed slower than on ADSL - o.k. the page probably loaded up quicker thanks to the 50mb but it just felt a bit wrong.

That sounds more like DNS.

Yes, most certainly DNS, and yes each and every DNS lookup will require a request to a remote server and a wait for the response so will be directly affected by network latency.

However this is more likely down to VM's DNS. Most people who know how, avoid VM's own DNS and hence get better performance. If you use VM's DNS you also have to deal with their poorly implemented 'Parental Controls' which slow things down even further.

FYI, the two most popular DNS options are Google and OpenDNS, both of these can give better web page response on VM and other ISPs.

in my area its as if VM are always 1 upgrade behind.

They do an upgrade, utilisation levels become respectable. However they then change modem config's for new packages for what the upgrade was intended and congestion reappears.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

in my area its as if VM are always 1 upgrade behind.

They do an upgrade, utilisation levels become respectable. However they then change modem config's for new packages for what the upgrade was intended and congestion reappears.

Student area perchance?

I think is partially student area, it depends how much the node covers.