Bad latency at peak hours during the day

[nikhanda]

So I play esports for my university, and I recently moved into my new house for second year in Selly Oak, Birmingham. During the summer, while most students and some neighbours were at home, my ping was perfectly fine, with no spikes that I can remember (ethernet connection).

I went home for a few weeks and have now come back for the start of term and my latency variation is quite terrible at certain times of the day (around 6pm to 11pm) and generally bad during the rest of the day, with my jitter being around 60ms and my min max ping being 15-300 on ping tests, while download speeds stay high at around 25 MB/s. My teammate, who lives a few roads from me, gets the exact same ping spikes at the exact same time while we're playing games, and he is also on Virgin Media. We have nothing else in common on our setups, apart from us both using ethernet. I have tried buying a new router and putting the Hub 3 in modem mode, changing cables, changing ports. It is definitely a fault of Virgin, whether that is bad routing or oversubscription or both.

Here is a link to one of my ping tests at 8pm https://www.netmeter.co.uk/ping-test/202142-127222-e0f8.html

I'm having to stop playing because of this, which is frustrating for myself, my team and my university.

[Andrew-G]

Search for posts mentioning over-utilisation.  

[Adduxi]

Also you need to setup a BQM to monitor the state of the circuit, to see if it is over utilisation.  www.thinkbroadband.com/ping

Once this is up and running for 24 hours you will get a picture of the circuit usage and have evidence one way or the other.

[Paulina_Z]

Hi @nikhanda,

Welcome to our Community Forums! Thank you for your post, and I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing some ongoing issues with your connection. I can understand how frustrating this can be. 

I've had some issues locating your account through your Forum details, and in order to look into this issue further, we would need access to your account. To do this, I will send you a Private Message to confirm a few details, so we can look into this issue further.

Please keep an eye out for a purple envelope at the top right corner of your Forum page. I will be in touch soon.

Thank you.

[Paulina_Z]

Hi @nikhanda,

Thank you for confirming your details with us over Private Message. I have been able to locate your account and I cannot spot any obvious issues at the moment.

Can you please reboot your Hub as I can see that the current uptime is showing as 18 days.

Please let us know if your connection issue improves at all after the reboot. If not, I will be more than happy to look into this further for you.

Thank you.

[nikhanda]

Hiya,

Nothing has changed and I'm not surprised, I've rebooted the hub too many times to count. As I said, I am confident this is not an issue I can personally do anything about, I've tried all troubleshooting steps I can do on my part.

[jem101]

@nikhanda and you are almost certainly right in as much as you won’t be able to do anything about it! The clue would be in your original post, all was fine when it was quiet in the Summer and the wheels promptly fall off once things get busy again - a BQM (as requested a little while ago) should confirm the issue but it does sound very much like over utilisation on the local circuit to me.

If so, then will VM fix it? It can be very expensive and not always immediately possible to do, past experience of others on this forum would not be encouraging. 

[David_Bn]

Thanks for your forum post @nikhanda, can you tell me if you've been able to create a BQM as requested?

Looking into the local area, we don't currently have this flagged as network congestion

Kindest regards,

David_Bn

[nikhanda]

Yes I have. 

Here's an the graph from last Tuesday: 

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/abf9d148850e64de9bdc88b624606da732... 

[risc19]

Are you sure it virgin?

I've never seen a virgin connection with a average latency that tight before.