For all Gamers with lag: Puma chipset and the Virgin media development department.

[Laura96]

So I have been experiencing so much latency ping and jittering like many of you have and after updating every part of my set up and spending a bunch of money i have narrowed it down to the biggest offender. The Puma 6 chipset inside your Home Hub 3.

If you are a gamer or streamer what matters most is having a consistent smooth FPS experience. Unfortunately for all the pros of Virgin and its wonderful staff it is let down by the Home Hub 3, more specifically the Puma 6 chipset by Intel/Arris who have now made a Puma 7 chipset with similar issues. As a community of Virgin media I think we all - including the staff need to rally together to make this service as good if not better than what is advertised. 

No amount of software patches will fix this hardware problem and putting the HH3 in modem mode doesn't help either. The puma chipset line is poorly made in comparison to what is available on the market. The Virgin media development department with the final say on this has to be woken up in order to realise that people aren't stupid, if they continue with this chipset they will continue to lose customers permanently. 

Solutions;

-Scrap the Puma chipset line altogether in favour of any other better chipset for the Home Hub 4.

- Release a pro version of the Home Hub 3 with a different chipset tailored for gamers. (I would pay extra for that happily)

-Make a list of 3rd party modems which are compatible with Virgin DOCSIS 3 in Europe. Like BT does.

 https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2018/08/intel-coughs-to-puma-cpu-flaw-that-hit-virgin-media-hu...

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r31122204-SB6190-Puma6-TCP-UDP-Network-Latency-Issue-Discussion~sta...

https://www.classactionlawyers.com/puma6

[Adduxi]

Some interesting points Shane.

However, I would be curious how the large Cable operators in the States manage and allow users to buy their own Modems.  Maybe the actual WAN side is different, or they don't buy thousands of "get you going" hubs for their user base. 

Who knows 🙂

[shanematthews]

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@Adduxi wrote:

Some interesting points Shane.

However, I would be curious how the large Cable operators in the States manage and allow users to buy their own Modems.  Maybe the actual WAN side is different, or they don't buy thousands of "get you going" hubs for their user base. 

Who knows 🙂

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Probably more modern infrastructure, a lot of the VM backend is still kicking around from the old NTL days, they haven't bothered upgrading it because it just wasn't worth the costs involved and because it was never a "problem", at this point it just isn't viable to fix the legacy issues that come with the network, in america it also helps that there is competition in the cable space so each cable provider has to keep trying to improve, we basically have a monopoly so if you want cable and don't live in a major city with its own cable network you kind of have no choice 😛

To make a comparison to another company in a similar condition just look at intel, they had no competition so they never bothered updating their CPU's and now they are being hit with security issues left and right because something that affects one chip affects most, they got complacent without any competition, competition breeds innovation

[Laura96]

Thank you Shanemathews I think that I understand now, I have not seen a full explanation until now it is usually so generic or just somebody telling me how the firmware patch fixed it for them so I shouldn't complain, which is what really **bleep** me off.

Anyway maybe in the future Virgin will be good for gaming but i'll take your first advice and start looking for alternatives that better suit me and with all of this new information I can make a better decision this time round. 

[TheChairman]

Actually Virgin could have done more as they are a large customer. Of course then there would be a lot of legal wrangling so it's easier cheaper to try and let a fudge fix the issue to make them acceptable.

They should have listened to the testers who reported this issue and dealt with the issue rather than hoping nobody notices.

Anyway Intel are selling the division and as long as Virgin do proper testing for the next hub and listen to the testers in the field it hopefully won't happen again.

Another thing virgin could do is have a small set of recommended modems and allow people to choose from those. It will increase support costs but then how how much does it cost for tech support to have several scrips?

Ah modem X1 get the modem X1 script. Have you turned it on and off. No well can you do that and ring back in a couple of hours if there's no improvement.. Bye have a nice day. Hello Modem X3 is it. Okay have you turned it on and off No okay please can you do that and ring back in a couple of hours in if there's no improvement. And so on. 🙂

[Kippies]

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@Adduxi wrote:

Some interesting points Shane.

However, I would be curious how the large Cable operators in the States manage and allow users to buy their own Modems.  Maybe the actual WAN side is different, or they don't buy thousands of "get you going" hubs for their user base. 

Who knows 🙂

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Its about security rather than cost. VM lock down the equipment they supply to an account so have total control (more or less) over what connects to their network. In the good (bad) old days your modem could be cloned easily and ne'ere do wells could impersonate your modem to get access to services for nowt. Now firmwares locked down and ONLY authorised devices can connect (largely)

America never had the same level of issues as they are ....well Americans. Not just as ermmm Ill go with "Savvy"

And we Brits have to conform to Murrican international standards for digital security, even though the Murricans dont themselves. On a side note, if murrican Pharma had to conform to the data security they foist on our pharma companies, they would BE no Murrican pharma industry. Ive seen that first hand. Telecoms is pretty much the same.

COST comes into the equation when you look at the slice of LG's pie that we very self important British islers make up of the revenue pie. Its not a lot. Trust me. So we get the same gateway box as the rest of EMEA, and that goes for V6 too.PUMA6 or alternative SOC's  was pretty much cost neutral.

The savings to LG come in buying ALL Arris kit- from the CMTS to the STB's and gateways. In the quantities LG have committed to, Arris would have put anything they wanted as the processor. The puma6 issues only got flagged AFTER such decisions were made. And NEVER should have happened. It  was (is) purely an Intel problem.

As a side-note, most American gateways suitable for connection to HFC networks in the current gen ALSO ran (run) PUMA6 , and had (have) the same issues.

Not defending VM- HUB3 IMHO should have gone back to the drawing board. But that is, I stress my opinion. I would also emphasis MY real world testing shows no difference to the user experience caused by the PUMA6 issues, before or after the fix.  HUB3 has far more fundamental problems, which largely go by the board as everything gets blamed on the the PUMA6 code....YMMV

[CMAC1986]

What would be your suggestion of what I am experiencing? delayed gameplay, slow reactions and choppy all around experience, I have had 3 engineers out since that hub was installed. All was great before and now its not. surely something is happening and causing me a headache just like alot of others.what was once a great service for gaming (in my experience) is now not. So i wanted to know why and how things are different for me.

[Kippies]

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@CMAC1986 wrote:

What would be your suggestion of what I am experiencing? delayed gameplay, slow reactions and choppy all around experience, I have had 3 engineers out since that hub was installed. All was great before and now its not. surely something is happening and causing me a headache just like alot of others.what was once a great service for gaming (in my experience) is now not. So i wanted to know why and how things are different for me.

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Have you had all your other metrics checked? (power levels etc) by someone on here?

What does your network topology LAN side look like?

Have you tied testing by popping the HUB into modem mode and just connecting the ONE device you are playing on with a CAT6 LAN cable?

[Lee2]

All isp routers are trash tbh you have nothing but problems with them i.e connection drops, fluctuating speeds, slow loading web pages. I was previously with virgin and had expect problems with lag in every game. I recently switched to BT using their smarthub and had exact problems. Various phone calls and connection checks my connection was perfectly fine with 21ms ping and was wondering why my gaming experience was so poor and started digging deeper so my connection was fine, ping to the game servers was perfectly fine. Then why am i lagging? Was only one thing i could think of: The isp default routers (They're trash btw) so I've ordered my self a good third party router. Big advantage with bt is that you can just switch the router without putting theirs in modem mode. Im hoping this fixes my lag problem. Have you tried running traceroute to a game server? It'd show you what's causing the lag. On my traceroutes it shows the high pings starting at zayo.com. I don't necessarily think it's a isp issue, i personally thing its the third party network they're using to route the data to the game servers (zayo.com)

[RedGooner]

Remember the Puma chipset is not VM fault, Intel brought Texus Instruments, and reworked there firmware. VM are a victim to.

But its the way VM buried there head in the sand, once people found and reported the problems. That's what made many gamers angry, if VM had said been more open and listened to the gamers, maybe we would not be in this mess.

I came late to the PUMA issue, as I was a beta tester for the SH2, and SH2AC, I stayed using my 2AC until I moved house last year, and had to have a SH3.

But in that time I have used the SH3 in modem mode, since day one, and lag has never been an issue for me.  

[Laura96]

I have a cat 7 15m cable is that better or worse than the cat 6?

also my contract with Virgin won't end until January 2020, can I downgrade my virgin media package before that time ? 

finally I would like to downgrade my package so I can sign up up to another ISP at the same time, would there be any problems with having two isp's in one home?