Ofcom are not going to care about this, hence VM been able to have congestion faults that span for years in certain areas.

They would only maybe care if this affected phone services.

I got a quote for a leased line and that was £270 a month for 100x100Mbps not exactly in budget.


I agree. I get 500 down and up for that price - and they were doing a double free speed deal at the time so I actually get 1Gbps up and down for that price. They were ripping you off from the start what a terrible company

In reply to a post by lockyatlrg:

And again tonight with the congestion.

and again, I am completely losing the will to live.

Is there a way to check congestion / overutilisation in specific areas? I will be bashing my head against the wall if I run into the same issues I witnessed years ago.

I have had enough of faults developing on my FTTC broadband line. Quietline tests have always been fine but I seem to suffer from niggling faults all of the time with FTTC (not crosstalk related) so I put in a order for gig1. I have had a troubled history with Virgin Media in the past unfortunately. This was back in 2015-2016 when many areas were affected by overutilisation. I was on their highest package at the time 150Mbps but the connection speeds used to dropdown to 5-15Mbps download at peak time with a 0.2-1Mbps of upload. You literally couldn't do anything between 15:00 and 00:45.

I really hope they have improved since then in the area I'm in... I'm stuck between FTTC and Virgin Media. FTTC as only ever been down once in 6 years but I have had loads of problems with PPP sessions being dropped and struggling to resync for hours and the issue with faults developing on the line causing an inconsistent amount of errors making the internet unstable. Where is the stability, reliability at?

In reply to a post by Swift0r:

Is there a way to check congestion / overutilisation in specific areas? I will be bashing my head against the wall if I run into the same issues I witnessed years ago.

I have had enough of faults developing on my FTTC broadband line. Quietline tests have always been fine but I seem to suffer from niggling faults all of the time with FTTC (not crosstalk related) so I put in a order for gig1. I have had a troubled history with Virgin Media in the past unfortunately. This was back in 2015-2016 when many areas were affected by overutilisation. I was on their highest package at the time 150Mbps but the connection speeds used to dropdown to 5-15Mbps download at peak time with a 0.2-1Mbps of upload. You literally couldn't do anything between 15:00 and 00:45.

I really hope they have improved since then in the area I'm in... I'm stuck between FTTC and Virgin Media. FTTC as only ever been down once in 6 years but I have had loads of problems with PPP sessions being dropped and struggling to resync for hours and the issue with faults developing on the line causing an inconsistent amount of errors making the internet unstable. Where is the stability, reliability at?

So as far as I know the best way to check for local congestion / overutilization or area issues is to speak to the neighbours, it's a really effective way of isolating faults.

Today I had a VM engineer to replace my HUB 3 to a HUB 4 as the HUB 3 failed (loads of issues with it).

Since I got the HUB 4 today, I have had no issues in a small amount of time (3 hours 10 mins) on the HUB 3 by now i would have PRE RS errors and modulation drops.

As a whole my service is better.

The national fault seems to be fixed (for now).

Put it this way, I am getting 550Mbps constantly or at least every time I have checked and I live in an area known for congestion.

10Mbps on a 100Mbps connection for a long time, I have heard it all before.

A Virgin Media engineer I have had in the past stated that there is a lot of network congestion issues but because money is needed to fix it, no one wants to spend it.

He said the lockdown was perfect to show this, he said "during the first lockdown we lost so many technicians to cityfibre and most of them never came back" "our teams are getting abused because of network capacity issues we can't deal with, how am I meant to fix a problem when its been created on purpose, every time I report it, it comes back to me as 'its not a problem, give it a few days and it will fix itself', that's what we are up against" He proceed to say "Virgin Media's network is so fragile, any minor change in usage can make the difference between customers having issues and service to them not." "Those that don't often take it out on us as they think we are the ones making decisions, customers like yourself understand but the majority don't"

I think that speaks for itself. Even their staff are fed up

Is this still an issue? Just had a letter through the door saying Virgin will be cabling my street soon. There's no FTTP here, so Virgin would be my only option for faster speeds. Don't want to sign up if there's going to be a load of problems though.

I'm currently with BT (FTTC) and get around 50Mb.

In reply to a post by _Resonance_:

Is this still an issue? Just had a letter through the door saying Virgin will be cabling my street soon. There's no FTTP here, so Virgin would be my only option for faster speeds. Don't want to sign up if there's going to be a load of problems though.

I'm currently with BT (FTTC) and get around 50Mb.

Hi,
Sorry for not spotting your message just got back from Norfolk and and off to France to dig a trench to do a fibre pull with Orange over the next two and a half weeks.

I have been on VM M500 for 4 Months or so now and everything seems to be working alright, my samknows whitebox shows no drops recently, only two and they were power cuts this week, Virgin don't have UPS's whereas my house does.

I will say I use my own router with the HUB 4 in modem mode as the defult ISP routers are generally poor and restrcited.

In terms of speeds like I said its consitant, here is some data for you Download speesds M500

The upload speed is a bit more inconsitant but its not a majour issue. Upload M500

The Latency aswell for you Latancy
Packet loss Packetloss

As you can see the data looks alright now.

I will say while the speeds do look fast there, there are points it drops between tests, as I do spot checks ocasionally, although I suspect this could be to do with my QOS and bandwith throttling with my config, but haven't got round to checking my theory.

Thanks for the reply and taking the time to provide the info RR.

Looks like it may be worth taking the risk then.

Not sure exactly when I'll be able to order. The generic letter saying that they will soon be starting work on my street was put through the door on Friday.

In reply to a post by _Resonance_:

Looks like it may be worth taking the risk then.

If you don't have VM in the street today, then it is almost certain they will be installing fibre into the road, and when you order they will use a convertor to coax on the outside of your home. This is "Project Lightning" expansion. It is still a DOCSIS connection and the modem or TV box in your home is the same as everywhere else.

These areas appear to have less issues with variable latency and outages (from looking at other BQMs), as the cabling in the ground is not 30 years old. Unlike mine and RR's areas, where the ground has coax cabling originally designed for TV and tweaked to handle broadband.

Always worth posting a new thread with your town name asking for other people's experiences, e.g. I'm in Farnborough, Hampshire, and the Virgin Media network here is run from Guildford, separate to the experiences of friends just down the motorway.

Edited by jchamier (Sun 31-Jul-22 16:05:13)

Interesting. Thanks for the info jc.