I've put this in gaming support as it does affect me most during online games. I'm on 500Mb, a "free" upgrade for taking out an O2 sim card (although that's a completely other topic, that we were literally blackmailed into taking out)
We've been battling daily packet loss issues with our connection for over a few years, with waves of good and bad. The truth is, we realistically have no other options for an ISP. Virgin Media has a complete monopoly in my area, with CityFibre or Openreach being completely uninterested in supplying FTTP here and unable to supply VDSL due to the pole being "too unsafe", even though it's a popular, built-up, suburb area.
Every day, at some point, the connection will go bad. There's two categories for this: Extreme packet loss making gaming completely impossible, or the more wide-reaching midnight-ish drops that seem to affect everyone on Virgin media (not just me, "RTC connecting" in discord or "No route" is a dead giveaway for this). This post is concerning the former, the extreme packet loss.
I thought I'd share my networking setup to help diagnose this, but I do not get any packet loss issues when pinging within my network to the Hub 3 directly. Although it does seem to suffer issues where part of the router will stop working, whether that's the online interface, one of the wifi bands, or something else unusual. We've complained, had it replaced, Virgin media is outright unwilling to provide the hub 4 unless we upgrade to 1gig.
I've got a fairly hefty PC, connected directly to the router via CAT 6. This ethernet cable is approx. 20m unshielded but doesn't appear to suffer any interference- test within the network pass with no issues at all - completely uninterrupted. The speed of this connection is 1gig, configured with a static IP.
Here are my current router power levels taken WHILE experiencing packet loss:
Packet loss in question:
Also pinging locally - no issues other than 1 high packet response time
Nothing usually relevant ever appears in the log to any of these issues, just DHCP stuff - but this time I got something I recognise (time on the router is 1h behind):
| 06/08/2023 17:54:21 | Warning! | RCS Partial Service;CM-MAC=ac:f8:xx:xx:xx:xx;CMTS-MAC=f8:b7:xx:xx:xx:xx;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0; |
Here is a number of results from different days from ThinkBroadbands monitor:
Today (now):
Friday 4th:
Thursday 3rd:
Wednesday 2nd (Seemed to affect the whole virgin media network):
Monday 31st July:
I just can't deal with the virgin media phone line, no offence, but if you work for the Virgin Media customer support lines I've probably not spoken to you. The tier 1 triage or whatever it is is shocking. The amount of times I've been pitched to be sold 1gig internet to fix this is insane. They're failing to recognise I have a genuine problem - even if I show them these graphs there's no chance they'll know what's going on. I can never, ever be escalated to someone who knows what they're talking about. This has been going on for years. I got really close with someone and I had some dude come around and replace my hub 3 but it doesn't solve the packet loss problems 😞
Please help.
Edit: accidental IP slip
Enough to boot me out of games. Especially when there's ~1 ping a second, 45 minutes of pings with over a minute of downtime is a joke.
We can't get Openreach - They won't install a line 😞
Fan, fine with. I can throw a noctua in there.
Mixed docsis 3.0/3.1 I'm not familiar with - will 500mb not work over 3.1? Why does it have to be mixed?
Is it normal to have this many post and pre RS errors? There's thousands.
Today hasn't been that bad, but the day isn't over - I'm expecting packet loss to hit between 9pm-11pm unless the entire network goes down again at midnight
I'm restarting now, but it won't fix this issue. It's been happening for years, we've restarted it hundreds of times. I'll probably get back to you in a few days with an update.
Here's before the restart - shocking really
