In reply to a post by chriscdotcodotuk:

VM are happy for me to go elsewhere and I'm happy to stay with BT. The connection is far far far more consistent around the clock and consistency is worth more to me than a few hundred mb headline speed. Sure, the upload would have been epic but such is life.

Yep, sounds like wherever nexfibre connect the local access network into the VM ISP network seems congested. I recall BRNT might be Brentford, one of the old regional areas for either CableTel, NTL, C&W Consumer or Telewest.

Edited by jchamier (Sun 03-Nov-24 20:04:31)

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Yep, sounds like wherever nexfibre connect the local access network into the VM ISP network seems congested. I recall BRNT might be Brentford, one of the old regional areas for either CableTel, NTL, C&W Consumer or Telewest.

Brentford is a backbone site. Most of the BNGs are going into backbone sites. These are big aggregation points for cable customers so inevitably will have some sites going through them that are congested. Makes sense to put the BNGs deeper into the network where lots of older cable areas come together and the sites that most resemble full on data centres rather than hub sites are. Cooling, power, connectivity and unlike cable no distance restrictions and can just add more and more BNGs fed by big data links as all digital.

BNG placement and access network congestion on sites connected to them are correlated but no causation there: Brentford is part of both the core London network and the backbone national network.

BNGs in Birmingham and Leeds, also backbone sites.

The actual interconnect site between Nexfibre and VM is probably the one mentioned on the cabinets then customers probably go over EVPN-VPWS on VM's network to get to the BNGs.

Cable you go IP where your cable connection terminates, this you come off the Nexfibre OLT and go onto a VLAN which is carried across VM's network to a BNG.

In reply to a post by chriscdotcodotuk:

I went to run a few wireless speed tests as I've disconnected my device from my main network and the speeds were all over the place. London servers, Maidstone servers (I'm near sittingbourne so this is closest to me) and they were jumping from 650 down to 150 down and anywhere up to 6% packet loss and 4ms jitter. Its 4pm on a sunday afternoon.

Pings are all a bit worse than on BT (7-10ms) vs a steady 6ms. Throughput speeds are better most of the time on VM but I'm sat right next to the hub and my home wifi maxes out at 600mb (ish) most of the time vs the 5X which does far faster. I've seen wireless speeds of 900mb on it so this 650 is as fast as it's actually running.

brnt-bng-1-sub.network.virginmedia.net --> brnt-core-2a-ae15-11.network.virginmedia.net. -->

Ta. The slightly longer pings make sense, can explain those easily enough. The wireless... yes. Not much use having 1.1 Gb day and night if cabled when most of what you're doing is wireless that is all over the place, not even close much of the time.

Thanks for indulging me.

Not so much for you given you're on your way but for folks more generally when looking for the closest test aim for the one closest to the BNG rather than your own location. VM's address ranges tend to be localised due to the cable network heritage but the shortest distance across the network is actually from BNG to the speed test server.

I was only being lazy testing the speed wirelessly as you asked at that point but when I tested before I tested via two wired machines (2.5gb connections) and the speeds recorded every half hour went from 1140 all the way down to 600mb later in the evening with the uploads going from 108mb down to 60mb in the evening.

Pings started off nice with 3.6ms results to a few locations in London but as the day progressed those 3.6-4.2ms pings slowly crept up to more like 8-12ms with some outliers sitting at 15-20ms.

During the day packet loss was a nice steady 0% but again in the evening you'd get results that'd range from 4% to the highest I saw of 18%.

I tested the connection whilst saturating the line with "linux iso files" and during the day the speed tests just plodded along and zero loss. During the evening the files were coming down/up a lot slower but the speed tests failed just as poorly.

I think over the space of 8 hours I must have ran 60+ speed tests trying different things to get different results.

The faff of swapping over network gear to test on a 2.5gb connection just to get more data was not / is not worth it to me so I just took the wireless data as an example. during the middle of the day today I did get >900mb on the wireless whilst simultaneously doing a speed test on my other wireless network using BT just to see if the RF noise and congestion would cause an issue, it didnt. The BT line did 600mb whilst the VM did 924mb both on their own wireless connections.

The issue that I saw gave me horrible flashbacks to an over congested exchange from maybe 10yrs ago when I was a VM customer. They resolved the issue but nightly the connection would become almost unusable.

To be clear, the devices I care about are hard wired but the tests were being lazy

Edited by chriscdotcodotuk (Mon 04-Nov-24 16:56:02)

I'm in Watford, which was cabled up very early - Jones Cable Media, before being taken over by NTL and eventually Virgin. I switched back to BT back in the NTL days and had gone over to Fibre to the Premises a while back - with a 108M down, 20M up connection with vodafone at present. It only costs £22 /month and is quite sufficient for my needs. The road had been dug up over the last month - replacing the gas main, and so it appears, putting in new Virgin fibre. A couple of days ago I had someone knock on the door offering a free 6 month trial of their latest system - supposedly a 2Gb/s connection, and their TV offering. No obligations beyond the 6 months, and the promise of £200 of Amazon vouchers for providing feedback regarding the service. I couldn't refuse!

They installed the fibre into the house the next day - and did a much better job than Openreach using grometts to go through walls, and made a very neat job of the work using a good number of cable cleats and much more intelligent routing. It is a slightly different system with fibre to the router - the Openreach is fibre to a wall box, then cable the last couple of metres to the router. So far, performance has been solid 800 to 850 Mbps down (almost certainly limited by my home network; -Gigabit wired ethernet or Wifi 5) and 200 to 250 Mb/s up.

However, if I were to continue with it beyond the 6 months, they would want about £130/month, so I see it as a nice to have, but not worth paying such a hefty premium. The TV package is of little use to me either; There isn't exactly a lot worth watching across all the extra channels now available to me.

In reply to a post by jerrytaff2:

A couple of days ago I had someone knock on the door offering a free 6 month trial of their latest system - supposedly a 2Gb/s connection, and their TV offering. No obligations beyond the 6 months, and the promise of £200 of Amazon vouchers for providing feedback regarding the service. I couldn't refuse!

They installed the fibre into the house the next day - and did a much better job than Openreach using grometts to go through walls, and made a very neat job of the work using a good number of cable cleats and much more intelligent routing. It is a slightly different system with fibre to the router - the Openreach is fibre to a wall box, then cable the last couple of metres to the router. So far, performance has been solid 800 to 850 Mbps down (almost certainly limited by my home network; -Gigabit wired ethernet or Wifi 5) and 200 to 250 Mb/s up.

Blimey, it lives! Thanks for this. Take it they didn't touch the existing coaxial cable in your home, any idea if they removed the cable between pavement and your home?

They laid the fibre in a new trench through the garden, but brought it from the existing access point in the pavement to the same place on the outside wall of the house - They removed the old grey junction box there, and the cable from that box into the house. They replaced it with a much larger (brown) junction box and, fibre which had to be routed across the front of the house and through our integral garage, and into the office.

I suspect that they removed the old cable from the street into that box, but I'm not sure. It was academic as far as I was concerned, as the cable hadn't been used for years.

They didn't touch any of the old cabling in the house, but I'd removed some of the internal wiring when redecorating, and the old TV feed is buried somewhere under the floor of an extension I had built a few years back,

Well I'm back again! I decided to just give them another go. Go all in and get the 2gig symmetrical connection from the very start to see if it was the changing of stuff that caused issues.

I'm here after a month of heavy usage and I have to report that evening speeds have been awesome until now. Last night there was an hour long outage from 23:30 -> 00:30 but that was quite a wide spread issue

Speed tests are all showing over 2000 each way and on a few of the London test servers they're down in the 3ms pings.

The kids games all work smoothly without the crazy packet loss I was seeing before.

I'm still using the supplied hub but its hooked into the rest of my network. Currently I don't need to do anything different as it's working just fine.

When I was happy with how it was working I upgraded the home wifi to Wifi7 gear and it's nice to have wireless speeds throughout most of my house sitting between 1200 and 1500mb up and down.