Poor speeds, down to 2mbps in the evenings

The level of irony with these issues is mind-blowing. I was just recommending VM to a friend last week, saying in any other area I'd warn against them based on previous experience, but since I've been in this house that my VM has been perfect - never seeing speeds under 300mbps (On M350).

I'd noticed a few signs of slow downs over a couple of days but didn't think too much of it, until a Youtube video started buffering and then thumbnails taking ages to load one evening.

A Speedtest revealed 2mbps. So after ruling out local factors I called VM, went through the usual motions of eliminating my equipment and an engineer was booked.

Engineer came, put an attenuator in, reterminated a damaged joint and left. That evening again, the problem was the same.

Lots of fuss later, I was able to get another Engineer back today who has done everything bar pulling me a new cable. He tells me that he thinks it's a network issue but can't report it until he's eliminated my cable by pulling a new one - a booking that is 3 weeks away.

Accpeting my fate, I called CS to ask for a credit for the lack of service and get offered £5/m for a few months. A cancellation threat got me a £26 credit in addition, but that was it.

Speeds seem fairly normal from midnight through to 6-7am, hover around 150mbps throughout the daytime and then fall to 2-5mbps between 5pm and midnight. I've setup a tool to monitor download speeds every 15 mins - https://imgur.com/a/mCXAERd

Any suggestions from the knowledgable folk here?

I'd really love to cancel and jump on a BT service, but I'm in the process of buying a house (which is serviced with BTW FTTP fortunately!) so I can't really be taking any other services on.

Edited by mikehiow (Sat 27-Feb-21 22:07:27)

That's the thing with VM, works great until it doesn't and then it's an absolute nightmare to get it fixed, I know, I've been there twice. But VM are my only option for decent speeds. Once I had to resort to filming the SH3 with a webcam to prove it was loosing connection.

Anyway, set yourself up one of these https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/... and I believe you may have to enable something in the SH3 to respond to pings - I can't remember as I use mine in modem mode.

It would also be worth double checking all your own equipment, I thought my connection was having issues, only to find an Amazon Fire TV hot enough to fry an egg on, once turned off the connection returned to normal, no idea what it was doing.

Yeah, I've already got a BQM.

It's showing classic signs of over utilisation but nothing to indicate quite how broken my connection is.

I had not thought of non-network factors like some kind of interference - it feels unlikely, but I'll kill the power to everything but the modem next time it's bad and see if it changes.

I left virgin after 2 years cos my connection was average at best during hours of 9am - 10pm every day

60% of my advertised downstream bandwidth — high packet loss and ping spikes

Web pages taking ages to load at times and corrupt downloads..

All my stats were in range as to SNR levels and power levels —- on the outside looked a perfect connection however it showed clear signs of heaviy usage in area

They hate re-pulling cables and try to avoid at all costs, so I assume they must think something is up. You are not supposed to have more than 2 cable repairs, do you know if it has been repaired before?

Did you have an attenuator fitted before? That in itself seems odd, as the more breaks you have the more the levels will drop. Do you know if they changed your tap point (messed around in cabinet lol)? This might be why you now have an attenuator on as they may have increased the power at the cabinet.

In reply to a post by gary333:

They hate re-pulling cables and try to avoid at all costs, so I assume they must think something is up. You are not supposed to have more than 2 cable repairs, do you know if it has been repaired before?

Did you have an attenuator fitted before? That in itself seems odd, as the more breaks you have the more the levels will drop. Do you know if they changed your tap point (messed around in cabinet lol)? This might be why you now have an attenuator on as they may have increased the power at the cabinet.

Attenuator was the first port of call before anything because my power levels were too high. This isn't the first time I've had VM attenuate power levels in a failed attempt to fix another issue.

The last engineer claimed to be the lead engineer for the area. He said he didn't think it was the cable, but wouldn't be able to escalate it while noise on the line was out of spec, however slight. I was surprised, since it involves an external contractor digging out the toby point that's been tarmaced over!

That clearly isn't the issue has my speeds have returned to something closer to normality today.

I said all along it was clearly an issue with the network somewhere, given that degredation coincided perfectly with peak times.

Edited by mikehiow (Tue 02-Mar-21 23:18:31)