PC gaming problems on National Broadband [ Edited ]

[Mark_Wilkin]

*The original PC Gaming problems thread is archived here*

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NOTE: If you're having issues with your cable connection can you please post to either our Cable forum or 50Mb forum. If you're having general issues with the speed of your National connection can you start a new thread in this forum. This will help us monitor the forums and identify any new issues as they appear.
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In September customers on our ADSL National Broadband service started reporting latency problems while playing a number of PC Games. Since then we have made a number of changes to our traffic management system that have improved things for a large number of customers.
 
We are continuing to work hard to try and reduce latency across our National ADSL network as much as possible and our latest set of changes is being implemented this week. We hope they will help improve things for customers still experiencing problems with a few PC games. We hope you'll continue to give us feedback on this as it's been vital in helping us investigate and resolve this issue.
 
Currently there seems to be a separate issue affecting World of Warcraft players on a number of different ISPs. In our case we've determined that this latency is caused by issues outside our network and therefore out of our control. If you've got problems with World of Warcraft can you report them in this thread in the general gaming forum as this will help us monitor these issues and the extent of both problems.
 
Finally as part of our ongoing network enhancements we're planning to upgrade the non-LLU part of our network to give a better allocation of bandwidth to every active customer at that moment in time. This will help ensure other customers don't take up more than their fair share of bandwidth while still making sure gaming traffic gets the priority it needs. We're aiming to roll this upgrade out during November and December 2009 and will keep you updated on our progress.

Technical Notes:
 
Ping tests and trace tests will show a high level of delay at certain points in our network at certain times of the day as they are in the lowest priority traffic class, this means they will not always give a true reflection of the latency you can expect when playing online games. They are however still very useful in tracing which route traffic is taking to a games server. To get a better idea of the true latency you're experiencing on your connection you can either use the tools included in your game to display it's current latency or possibly a tool like tcptraceroute.

[Wraith]

Ok.

1/ Dont play WoW, havent in years, however i do play eve/fallen earth/SWG/ i also beta test in quite a few others ( however due to NDAs i cannot disclose which).

2/ Your "new" traffic managment is a step backwards, an alarming amount of your customers are experiencing 0.50 Mbps and lower,which indicates a serious fault (the service status page doesnt reflect this however), eg

3/ Re the statement about pingtests/traceroutes, isnt that the information that was requested, and still is by Tech support?

4/ Fixes in the pipeline for Nov/Dec, these problems were first reported in Aug/Sept,will customers have those months ( until a fix is implemeted ) refunded or reimbursed?

[Draylynn1985]

This is quite clearly VM's fault and a controlled fault at that. Your strangling our bandwidth for an incompatibility issue that arised on the 22nd September with the Cisco Router Update, this is clearly unacceptable. Fix the incompatiblity issue, or close down the service that you clearly cannot provide.

I'm not going to switch ISP's yet, I am going to keep posting logs to CISAS about this and get reimbuirsed for all the tech phone calls, connection fee's and paid services that this is disrupting. Either fix, free disconnection/mac code or keep paying out.

I'm unable to play any game atm, let alone World of Warcraft and web browsing is taking forever.

[Tuggett]

I first joined Virgin at start of Nov and i have had nothing but problems with downloads and online gaming! This "fix" has done nothing and im getting very frustrated with this service, It feels like im paying money to virgin for nothing! i cant download i cant play online and youtube/website takes stuped times to load?

this is my speed tonight...(i couldnt link the picture)

Download : 0.54Mbs

Upload : .34Mbs

Ping : 120

 For a unlimited package this is not on..

[nigester]

same here - fine for 2 weeks then tonight from 7:00pm 0.3Mbs download & WOW unplayable. please tell me why we haven't ALL gone to BT ?????

[Tuggett]

tbh i didnt have one problem with them and now im regreating moving to virgin... whats going on?!

[BadTaste]

WoW unplayable from about 3pm onwards to Midnight usually. I get latencies of 4k and up.

[Draylynn1985]

Currently there seems to be a separate issue affecting World of Warcraft players on a number of different ISPs. In our case we've determined that this latency is caused by issues outside our network and therefore out of our control. If you've got problems with World of Warcraft can you report them in this thread in the general gaming forum as this will help us monitor these issues and the extent of both problems.

Can we cut the horse raddish here. This is a definate problem with Virgin Media's network. Seriously, stop trying to shunt blame outside your network, even the thread is full of Virgin Media network performance logs that show a problem with the Virgin Media network.

The throttling protocols are out of whack, OFC someone who's playing WoW only will see a performance downgrade whilst playing WoW, but it's not only the World of Warcraft game. Yes Telia can cause problems and they usually last 5 mins at around 150ms, on the odd occasion (3~4 times a year) that 5 mins can sup up 2000ms.

Suffice to say, can your technicians check that TCP/UDP port 3724/1119 is not being throttled as P2P, as that port is WoW's gaming port aswell.

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But lets face it, it's not an outside network issue if were all getting less than 0.6MB connections. I seriously can't stand this pointing fingers attitude Virgin Media have at the moment. It's clearly your problem.

Best open some more threads ahead of time, because it won't be long at this rate before this becomes 50 pages long with customers who are bored stupid and wanting to find an answer to this escalating problem.

[mheatley]

Same issue as everyone else honestly this is beyond a joke

[paulpicks21]

Same here , ours was fine for the first month we had it , now its getting worse and worse.

I used to get 2meg on my mobile broadband dongle , miles better than what I am getting in the evening with virgin , its a joke!

http://www.speedtest.net/result/611518494.png