Strange Packet loss issue with Hub 4

After searching the Virgin Media forums, I'm finding a lot of people with the same issue with the Hub 4.

My BQM will display packetloss (up to around 10%) after a few days, a reboot of the Hub 4 will reset this for a few days again.

I've had an engineer here telling me the levels and signal is 100%.

It seems from the Virgin Media forum people aren't getting anywhere with this.

MrSaffron, can you check Gig1 BQMs for packetloss? If you check mine for the past few days you'll see mine.

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...


That's yesterday, You can see where i rebooted the Hub 4

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Gaming-Support/...

A bit more information there.

Are you actually experiencing an issue with the service when the BQM is showing packet loss, or is it just that the BQM is showing packet loss?

I did at the start, game latency would spike up for a second or 2 and then be fine.

I'll let it get bad again, and test it more.

I thought it was just the Hub4 having a low priority for responding to pings, but others on the Virgin Forums saying the same, and they get the lag issues in gaming.

So you restart the Virgin router and the issue goes away. What do I need to check?

Looks like a software issue appears after a while with the virgin router, rather than an issue with the BQM i.e. if the BQM was randomly showing packet it would affect all ISP not just those with a virgin router

A monitor into the Virgin network that does not touch the DOCSIS part or any persons router
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

For comparison an IDNET VDSL2 line
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

Hi MrSaffron,

The issue is random, tomorrow it may start showing the red again, and when it does - If i reboot the router the red packet loss goes away.

It looks to be a Hub 4 issue from the Virgin forums, but no real fix is on there.

It's slowly starting to happen again... almost a week later.

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

Reading many of the posts on the Virgin forums (though nowhere near all of them) it looks like for some lines is that the Hub randomly starts showing packet loss on the BQM chart but the Hub itself doesn't suffer from packet loss in normal use.

If people with the BQM issue were actually suffering that much packet loss (some are showing as much as 10% of all traffic, every minute of the day) then the connection would be nearly unusable.

It appears the Hub randomly decides that ICMP pings aren't a priority and starts dropping/blocking them.
It would be a much bigger issue if all traffic actually suffered from the packet loss shown in the BQM.

If it's just the BQM then Virgin won't be in any rush to fix it. There are a number of router manufacturers that don't always play well with the BQM. Many routers see the huge amounts of pings coming from the TBB ping server and block them completely or partially.
The Virgin Hub 4 appears to do this randomly when used in router mode.

You need to run some additional tests to see if you are actually suffering the amount of packet loss being reported by the BQM or if it's just the BQM showing it.

Edited by j0hn83 (Fri 27-Nov-20 19:40:25)

I'm getting lag spikes when gaming too, for a second every few minutes on COD