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Help huge ping spikes whilst gaming

drix56
Joining in

Hi,

Wondering if anyone can help me with a latency issue ive been having for weeks now. Tried contacting virgin numerous times about high ping spikes / packet loss but not got any help they just seem to ask the usual is the broadband speed ok and basically just do a router reset. I decided to do a broadband quality monitor over the last day and see what it showed. As you can see it seems to be perfectly fine through the night and then be terrible from 10am onwards. Im guessing its over congestion in the area but other than that i have no idea. I have a 500mb/s connection which I use to game and obviously when im getting these ping spikes makes alot of games unplayable. Virgin keep telling me that my connection is perfect but as you can see from the graph its far from it.

Virgin Media.PNG

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/3ecb98e8fba911d2bf44bac9e386e1533b... 

Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks,

Dean 

1 REPLY 1

Andrew-G
Alessandro Volta

Certainly looks like congestion on VM's local network.  The BQM shows a typical over-utilisation pattern - you see how it's very poor during normal waking hours, and then pretty good from about half past midnight to 9 am? Shows that the network and your hub are working well when there isn't too much traffic.  Very occasionally there's problems that create a similar BQM but have causes that aren't VM's fault, such as a household of Twitchers and livestreamers who saturate the limited upload bandwidth on slower connections, but if that applies it should be obvious to you, and it would be easy enough to test this.  

If it's not your own household use that's causing this, then there's nothing you can do to improve matters. In some areas VM do indeed undertake work to rejig the local networks to balance loads and eliminate over-utilisation. But sometimes that's either not possible, or judged uneconomic if there's a need to spend money on more equipment. And sadly VM won't ever admit the truth, so even where there is a fault reference and a "fix date" there's no way of knowing if that fix date is actually backed by a plan of action and programme of works. Quite often it seems not, and as the fix date approaches it is simply moved a month or two ahead.  If contact with VM has not indicated any known over-utilisation fault then the company hasn't even acknowledged the matter yet.

Your options if this is not a household induced problem:

1) Sit it out, and hope that VM carry out network improvement works.  Could be fixed next week, could genuinely be the 12th of Never, and in either case you'll never be told anything accurate.  

2) Get yourself a new ISP. If you're in a fixed term contract you'll probably have to use the VM complaints process asking the company to resolve the latency fault within 30 days or to issue a deadlock letter so that you can take to the industry complaints scheme CISAS (if need be) to be released from contract without penalty.

If you get into formal complaints and escalation, the grounds of your complaint is the poor performance, and your request for release from contract without penalty is twofold: First the Consumer Rights Act 2015 that requires any consumer service to be provided with "reasonable skill and care", and second, the Ofcom Fairness Commitments, that state "Customers’ services work as promised, reliably over time. If things go wrong providers give a prompt response to fix problems and take appropriate action to help their customers, which may include providing compensation where relevant. If providers can’t fix problems with core services they have promised to deliver within a reasonable period, customers can walk away from their contract with no penalty."