There are no exchanges on cable - the smallest network segment is a node and that covers way way less than a three digit postcode area - typically just a few streets. It's the luck of the draw whether or not you get congestion on your node and VM don't seem to care whether you do or not.

The TBB monitor shows ever increasing average ping and jitter on my new port. As I downgraded from 50 t0 10Mbps when it first became heavily congested I do still get 9+Mbps down 24x7 but do see occasional upstream congestion. No idea what it would be like if I were still on 50Mbps but I don't think it would be brilliant judging by the TBB monitor.

The good news from my POV is that my scheduled Infinity avaiability has been brought forward from Dec 2012 to June 2012. I can soon be free of this awful company and their abysmal network management.

Eugh, I'm in the CB1 area, getting near the middle of town, and I'm seeing some atrocious speeds at times. My housemate goes on iPlayer, and suddenly the entire connection turns into a dead dog.

Most days I can't even get iPlayer to stream properly. I've taken to downloading them (often slowly) first so I can watch them. This is meant to be 30Mbps! I'm not sure whether to blame it on the SuperHub though, since at times I can't even get DNS lookups to go through if too many devices are connected throughout the house.

Anybody had any luck in complaining? What are the initial checks Virgin ask you to do, so I can get them out of the way?

I'm in CB22 - I had a horrendous connection for the first 6 months of 2011 which got fixed after the CEO got involved and then went pear shaped again from Oct onwards. They've just fixed it again and is now the best connection I've ever had. The problem in my case wasnt classic utilitsation but was the number of modems connected to an upstream section of the network. Its designed for a certain number and in Cambridge many more were connected and this results in packet loss even if the speed you're getting isnt too bad. The stats that customer service look at dont look at this - they only look at total utilisation in which case the ends users connection may be no good for streaming, but everything at Virgins end says everything is ok.

I'll be very happy if my connection stays the way it is now but I wont hold my breath.

I disconnected all my wireless clients, then hooked up a laptop to the superhub with an ethernet cable, and was getting 30Mbps without a problem, so it's not the connection, unless it's based on the time of day. Switching the wireless speed form 300Mbps down to 145Mbps improved the speeds over the wireless to about 15Mbps per client, which is more acceptable.

I'll retest tomorrow evening to confirm, but it's looking much better now.

Mine remains unfixed here in CB24. Re-emailed the CEO again today as I've seen no result since doing it back in December. If anything it's actually got worse.

As it is I've now cancelled my direct debit. Over the past year I've had a total of a tenner refunded to me for my trouble. Bit of a joke. I figure if they can only provide me with 5% of a service, I'll pay them 5% of the bill until it's fixed.

While VM are very inefficient in fixing congestion issues you'll quickly find that they are very efficient in adding fees for bounced DD requests and also in passing debts over to debt collection agencies. I'd recommend that you go through the proper cancellation process rather than just cancelling the DD. Just call 150 and select thinking of leaving if you are unsure how to cancel.

I've complained on the forums and by CEO office and still nothing has changed.

LAG

My question is why do VM not upgrade the nodes ahead of schedule? They own the kit in the cab so what they effectively need to do is just add more fibre to link back their central office? It can't be that expensive to push more fibre through the ducts?

Are saying is that there is congestion on selected nodes but the VM core network has lots of spare capacity?

Cabinets with fibre will have multiple fibre in them already, so usually not even that that is an issue.

Think more about the costs of peering, i.e. links from VM to the internet, and the high ultisation of upstream, which can affect the cost of peering, and willingness for some to peer direct.

down to cost.

They seem to wait for customers to complain and then if the threshold is exceed as well then relief work gets done.

This relief work isnt guarantueed to be an upgrade it could just be a rebalancing act to slightly improve things and get usage down to just under the threshold.

Also if a ticket gets opened by someone at VM for congestion (high utilisation) and the utilisation temporarily improves its possible for the ticket to simply be closed without any resolution carried out.

Edited by Chrysalis (Fri 20-Jan-12 19:00:36)