I just find it ironic how VM keep beating the 'we give everyone the speed they pay for' drum, criticising 'up to' speeds from DSL providers and claiming consumers are being misled by those ISPs. And all that whilst seemingly ignoring problems such as this on their own network meaning there's a vast difference between speed tests and achievable speeds in the majority of real downloads. Who's misleading customers with the 'up to' speed again VM???

In reply to a post by watercooled:

in the majority of real downloads

Majority? I think you'll find it is actually a minority of real downloads. It is perhaps even a statistically insignificant number, and though I don't have access to actual numbers to prove that, the anecdotal evidence on this forum certainly constitutes an insignificant statistic.
Of course that anecdotal evidence here and on their own forums does indicate there is some kind of issue but if you are looking for a majority then the only valid one is: 'the overwhelming majority of VM customers have no issue or do not notice the issue', which is exactly what they'd say to WatchDog or Ofcom.

So every HTTP, FTP download through web browsers and FTP clients, Windows Updates, OSX updates, Microsoft store downloads, VPN tunnels, PSN downloads, Xbox Live downloads, iOS updates and downloads, Android updates and downloads, Netflix streaming, Youtube streaming, Amazon video streaming, iPlayer streaming, just to list a few is a 'minority' of downloads as you describe it? Yeah OK then...

If you're not affected, great for you, the fact is this affects the *majority* of downloads and network activity for people who are affected, exactly like I said. You might want to consider losing the condescending attitude if you don't fully understand the extent of the problem. When significantly affected, the connection becomes about as usable as a long ADSL line, hence why myself and a load of other people in the same boat have left and gone to ISPs without this problem.

'Not noticing' does not mean there is not a problem especially given how Virgin phone support apparently have no idea what the problem is and just continuously blame the Internet as a whole for the problems before accepting the issue lies on their own network, and they point at the (highly multithreaded) ookla speed test as 'proof' they're not to blame which is misleading at best. Many/most people would likely not 'notice' the difference between a 50 and 200Mb connection were it not for speed tests - is that reason enough to limit all of VM's packages to their base 50Mb speed for everything but speedtests going by your logic?

Myself and plenty of other people (bear in mind a tiny minority of people with problems will actually bother to complain on forums) with the problem noticed easily enough, even if not everyone immediately realised what was causing it.

Edit: Unless the 'minority' you're referring to is the number of people affected vs total ISP subscribers? That's entirely possible and not the point I'm trying to make - but I do know for a fact that every one of the ~5 people I know on the same CMTS have the exact same problem, but a friend at the other side of the city and connected to a different headend seems to be unaffected, and yet more people in other parts of the country are completely unaffected.

However there is nothing remotely anecdotal about the performance of the affected connections.

Edited by deleted (Mon 21-Nov-16 19:17:49)

Yeah, it really is surprising that a single customer having an issue will experience that issue on pretty much all their downloads isn't it? Duh! And sure, please change what you meant by majority to have a go at me.
All I am saying is that it is apparently a very minor issue in real terms which is why you will not get VM to do anything. If it is an issue for you then simply vote with your feet and go to another provider.

is that reason enough to limit all of VM's packages to their base 50Mb speed for everything but speedtests going by your logic?

Well, even if they did actually put a hard limit in place like that for everyone I for one wouldn't have an issue and I doubt there would be many who would. So long as I can stream a number of HD/UHD movies/shows simultaneously and download games multithreaded I'll be happy.

I thought a little about why ofcom and the ASA appear to be doing nothing about it, and I suspect that politically it would be a disaster if VM stopped investment and the existing 300mbit products were ruled to not count as 300 in congested areas, so its probably been decided to ignore it and in exchange VM carry on expanding their footprint without worries of having to deal with throughput issues.

Does that mean that paying for a fast download but getting less than 50% of the advertised speed is acceptable as long as catch-up tv is ok?

Here's a speed test I did earlier

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Other than speedtest.net and game downloads everything else rarely exceeds 50Mbps.

It's frustrating that Virgin are so dismissive of this problem, I still see speed tests from users that can reach 200Mb on single thread downloads. Shouldn't that speed be available to all users? How is it fair that in this area we can pay for 200Mb yet can only download at 50Mbps, but somewhere else they pay for 200Mb and can download at 200Mbps?

The ageing RiverDelta (Motorola) CMTS's seem to be the common link between everyone who has this problem. The sooner Virgin replace them the better, with any luck it will resolve the issue.

In reply to a post by broadband66:

Does that mean that paying for a fast download but getting less than 50% of the advertised speed is acceptable as long as catch-up tv is ok?

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking? Taking the question at face value, I guess the answer would be no?

Mine is pretty bad too, like this every evening really

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

My single thread download speed any any HTTP test file I can find never seems to exceed a rate of 1 Mb/s transfer.

I'm not sure how to check what CMTS I'm on but as this area was cabled back when Diamond Cable was a thing even before NTL so I'm guessing it's an old one.

There are a couple of ways to find the MAC address of the CMTS which you can use to look up its manufacturer. It's probably best not to post the whole address here though, the first 6 digits are enough to do this lookup.

If you have a Superhub 3, have a look through the network logs, you should find the CMTS MAC address after messages such as those starting with DHCP RENEW.

I don't know of a direct way to find the MAC address on the SH2, but if you're using it in modem mode, have a look in the ARP table of your connected router. They're laid out differently depending on manufacturer and some might not show this table at all, but have a look if it specifies one on the WAN interface, or if not see which one is associated with the IP of the default gateway (this IP will start off similar to your own public IP address but the last part will be different, usually lower).

Once you have the MAC address, put at least the first 6 digits into a lookup site such as this: https://macvendors.com/