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.