Forum Discussion

Davio's avatar
Davio
Tuning in
2 years ago

SuperHub 2 upgrade to 3 (4 and 5 not available) - get 3rd party router?

I have a SuperHub 2 (12+ years old). I just contacted Virgin for an upgrade - told that SuperHub 4 is sold out and version 5 not available, so I'm receiving a SuperHub 3.

As far as I understand 3 = DOCSIS 3.0 and I was hoping for DOCSIS 3.1 (much better latency for gaming?).

Is it worth using the SuperHub 3 in modem mode and getting an upgraded 3rd party router? Would this bring measurable performance improvement?

TIA.

  • Client62's avatar
    Client62
    Alessandro Volta

    Latency occurs for 3 main reasons: distance to server / game server overload / network congestion.
    These are all items that are outside of your control & can be far beyond the VM network.

  • jpeg1's avatar
    jpeg1
    Alessandro Volta

    If you add your own router you will have a much bigger increase in consumption. 

    • Davio's avatar
      Davio
      Tuning in

      Obviously. But is the performance improvement worth it? Data?

  • legacy1's avatar
    legacy1
    Alessandro Volta

    Their will be no performance improvement just that you have a better router, and wifi and better bufferbloat control 

    Docsis latency from 3.0 to 3.1 will not change you still be limited to how well the area is which you can use BQM to check

  • Roger_Gooner's avatar
    Roger_Gooner
    Alessandro Volta

    The hub 3 supports DOCSIS 3.1 and is good for M600, so you are getting a suitable hub.

    • cje85's avatar
      cje85
      Trouble shooter

      Roger_Gooner wrote:

      The hub 3 supports DOCSIS 3.1 and is good for M600, so you are getting a suitable hub.


      The Hub 3 is DOCSIS 3.0 only, but the difference in latency between 3.0/3.1 is negligible on VM's network.

  • Roger_Gooner's avatar
    Roger_Gooner
    Alessandro Volta

    Oops, I knew the old hub 3 only supports DOCSIS 3.0 and don't know why I made a wrong post. The hubs which support DOCSIS 3.1 are the later hub 4 and hub 5. If you're getting a hub 3 it means that you've subscribed to a speed up to M600.

    Having said that, if you're on up to M600 and you have a hub 4 or a hub 5 VM can provide a DOCSIS 3.1 channel both on downstream and upstream for better network performance.

  • jpeg1's avatar
    jpeg1
    Alessandro Volta

    Can't say I've noticed any difference in performance between Hub 2-3-4, all in modem mode of course. 

    VM will be glad to replace your Hub 2.   But they'd rather give you a recycled Hub 3 if it's suitable for your speed, rather than a new 4 or 5. 

  • I had a hub 3 on M500, and it was rubbish, everytime I tried to download a large file, it would throttle after about 30 seconds, and ended up with a download speed of about 150kb.  Engineer swapped out for a hub 5, and now getting 48-50Mibs when downloading large files now.  I only ever use the Hub 5 in modem mode as I have an Asus AX mesh system with 3 routers, one for each level of the house.  even at the bottom of my garden (160ft) im getting 150mb+ on wifi.

    • Davio's avatar
      Davio
      Tuning in

      HUGH_EFFO wrote:

      I had a hub 3 on M500, and it was rubbish...


      My hub 3 arrives tomorrow so will soon find out.I'm switching from M250 to M350 at the same time.

      I've taken a benchmark of the hub 2 with https://speed.cloudflare.com/ - are there any other tests worth doing to compare and check performance?

      • Daniel_Et's avatar
        Daniel_Et
        Forum Team

        Hi Davio, thank you for your posts.

        How have things been since you received your Hub 3?

        We'd suggest testing your speed, on a hard wired connection, through speedtest.net

        Information on our estimated broadband speeds can be found in this article here. The minimum guaranteed download speed for the M350 package is 181 Mbps. 

        Please pop back to us at your earliest convenience.

        Regards,
        Daniel