The TBB monitor shows latency - http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/monitors.html

Variations in latency are jitter and on the graphs is the blue and yellow area. A typical Infinity chart will be predominantly green with just a smidgin of blue/yellow. You virtually never see that with a cable chart - there is always a noticeable blue and yellow area. Sometimes very noticeable.

All cable connections have jitter. The technology makes it inevitable. Moderate jitter up to (say) 10ms is relatively harmless above that it can cause issues with time sensitive apps such as voip streaming and gaming.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Tue 21-Aug-12 13:40:05)

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

The TBB monitor shows latency - http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/monitors.html

Variations in latency are jitter and on the graphs is the blue and yellow area. A typical Infinity chart will be predominantly green with just a smidgin of blue/yellow. You virtually never see that with a cable chart - there is always a noticeable blue and yellow area. Sometimes very noticeable.

All cable connections have jitter. The technology makes it inevitable. Moderate jitter up to (say) 10ms is relatively harmless above that it can cause issues with time sensitive apps such as voip streaming and gaming.

And it looks like this.

Interesting, I've now looked around at a few Infinity graphs and I see what you mean.
Also, interesting is that Infinity seems to generally have a higher minimum ping but I guess that may simply be the way the networks are connected.
FYI, my graph typically shows green to around 10ms, blue between 10ms and 15ms and then yellow spiking up to about 50-60ms, only very occasionally going any higher than that: Graph
I'd love to know why the blue bit isn't just a line, which is what I'd expect if it was a mean, rather than some undefined range.
I've never had any issues with gaming or voip. In fact my son reckons our connection is one of the best in his Xbox gaming circle.

For VM yours looks quite good. Here is mine - http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share-thumb/0f1e0... - that's a current snapshot and will change each time viewed - any really horrible bits will most likely be because I'm hammering the download - as of today there is some heavy downloading running up to the start of the morning STM period and an outage I've only just noticed by looking at the chart around 4pm which may or may not show in the log.

The reason the blue isn't a constant line is because it's the average during each sampling period not an all time average.

===
The log shows there were issues at the time and a complete outage. What caused it is a mystery - possibly some engineer fiddling with the taps to do an install nearby. Modem power levels unchanged but I do seem to have changed upstream channel.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Wed 22-Aug-12 20:11:09)

No, I meant that if each vertical line is one sampling period then I'd expect only one average to be marked per vertical. Having looked at the graph in more detail I can see that it isn't just one sample per vertical line so you have a range of averages for the sample periods - doh! Though it might be nice to have the option of viewing all the 864 sample periods, showing min, avg, max and fails.

oh dear.
i also just moved house and signed up to virgin, 4 miles from the exchange so didn't expect sky to be much use to me here.
VM rep insisted there was no shaping or restriction on the connection "it's unlimited, you can do what you like", seems he was talking out of his behind, so, besides the usage limits and congestion what else can i expect?

It's impossible to predict.

Until last night there was a peering issue which hit just about everybody over many routes which VM have at last fixed - or at least circumvented as their solution was to turn off the route in question so that will almost certainly have pushed up the loading elsewhere. That is unusual though as in the main congestion on VM is very localised so I may have a sweet connection but the guy a few streets away may have one that's almost unusable. The real problem with VM is that they are very slow to fix congestion issues.

IMO most people do reasonably well most of the time. I've had rubbish and good. On balance I find it OK. That may not be the case if I were a keen gamer though.

thanks, kb. I guess I'm going to have to accept that along with the increased speed (over sky llu), there is a price to pay

In reply to a post by Xplosion:

Expect fast speeds to start with, then as you use it they'll slow you down. Then a fault will arise and apparently the technical support is useless so it won't be fixed, forcing you to switch.

Oh and if you are a heavy downloader, your connection will be slowed down in the space of an hour.

I'd say cancel with Virgin and go with Sky. It's reliable, cheap, unlimited and not managed.

I have had no such problems. I have had a virtually faultless 8 years with VM and have always got the advertised speed or better. (The one exception being the recent peering problem.) Currently I always get 104.4Mb on a 100Mb connection. 24/7. I have never been traffic managed to my knowledge. Perhaps that is because I think it is antisocial to cane your connection by downloading torrents during the peak period. This would apply whatever ISP you may have. Even BT Infinity's purpose-built network can't handle maniac down loaders.