Forum Discussion

VenTooth's avatar
VenTooth
Settling in
5 days ago

Miserable Packet Loss

I've been having persistent packet loss ever since getting on Virgin Media, thankfully I still have my old connection so I can show a comparison:

Here is the old connection from Home Telecom:

And, in contrast, this is Virgin Media:

In practice this manifests as annoying, intermittent drop outs out of calls or any sort of online games. The BQM chart only shows the "average" over time, but in practice if an external server is pinging my router it looks like:

Where you can see large chunks of time with consistent drop out, leading to averages that look like:

This varies over the day, but it never fully goes away. I am at a loss at what I can do about this.

16 Replies

  • legacy1's avatar
    legacy1
    Alessandro Volta

    Was the hub moved and fibre line unplugged?

    • VenTooth's avatar
      VenTooth
      Settling in

      Yes. I've had other issues before this with a few engineer visits.

      But this particular snapshot taken yesterday was taken without it being moved or disturbed in any way.

  • It's also worth nothing that I have just now figured out that if I use a VPN, the packet loss is fine.

    So this may be an issue with some part of the external infrastructure, and not something in my home.

    • legacy1's avatar
      legacy1
      Alessandro Volta

      really a VPN fixes that  packet loss seems odd but then it can be a routing problem and your VPN routes around the problem.

      see what happens if you ping 194.168.4.100 for a bit or if you know the WAN IP gateway that too

      • VenTooth's avatar
        VenTooth
        Settling in

        Pinging 194.168.4.100 seems fine:

        However it does seem like the WAN gateway may be the weak link:

         

  • Bumping this issue as it is still on-going. 

    It is still rock solid when I'm tunneling through a VPN as it was yesterday, but gaming or voice chats are still out of the question without it. 

    I'm at a loss at what I can do to fix it or who I can talk to. I don't think that the support chat is even worth my time at this point. 

    • Matthew_ML's avatar
      Matthew_ML
      Icon for Forum Team rankForum Team

      Hey VenTooth, thank you for reaching out and a warm welcome to the community, we are so sorry to hear about your packet loss issue.

      We've had a look and from our end the connection is looking great, how has it been over the last few days?

      • VenTooth's avatar
        VenTooth
        Settling in

        It has not gotten any better and I am still looking for a solution.

  • legacy1's avatar
    legacy1
    Alessandro Volta

    Well thats odd that you get timeout to the gateway but not to VM DNS normally it be the other way round unless VM have setup a ping limit on this gateway which would seem odd.

    So given you can ping VM DNS fine the fibre line should be fine its just a routing issue

    Another thing you can try is ping 194.168.8.100 which VM moved  some time ago by more hop to get to it.

    As BQM is impacted you can run  tracert 80.249.99.164

    • VenTooth's avatar
      VenTooth
      Settling in

      If the issue was "only" visible from the pings, I could agree that it was a "ping limit" deal.
      But the problem I am trying to diagnose stems from the disconnects when trying to do voice calls, and I'm only seeing the ping packet loss in correlation with the issue.

      • newapollo's avatar
        newapollo
        Very Insightful Person

        Hi VenTooth,

        Your post of 4 days ago shows a screenshot of a hub 5x which indicates you are on VM's Full Fibre connection, however you state, "  I am trying to diagnose stems from the disconnects when trying to do voice calls, and I'm only seeing the ping packet loss in correlation with the issue."

        VM Full Fibre connections don't include a landline/voice calls option.

        Do you have a telephone connected to the hub 5x telephone port?  If so remove it and see if this  resolves your disconnection issues.