High latency

[jamiehunt90]

Hi All,

I've been struggling with high latency for months, maybe even years to be honest. We are on the 600mb package and generally speeds are fine but I have a lot of issues when gaming and I also work from home so Teams calls are also an issue at times. We've had various engineers come out who never appear to find anything and we've had multiple aspects of our infrastructure changed to no avail. Below is the last 2 days from the broadband quality monitor:

I've had this running for a while so there's a lot more evidence of +200ms response times. Any advice on what could be the issue? I'll post the upstream, downstream and network log in separate messages

[jamiehunt90]

Hi Steven,

It looks like there was a change on the 30th November which appears to have resolved the issue. Are you able to advise what this was incase the issue re-occurs in the future? (And for insight for others)

29th

30th - Change potentially around 09:30am

1st - Every day following this has a similar output

Cheers,

Jamie

[John_GS]

Hi Jamie, thanks for coming back to the thread.

You still do need a tech visit, please respond to my colleagues PM with the details so we can book this in

Best wishes,

[Andrew-G]

t looks like there was a change on the 30th November which appears to have resolved the issue.

Potentially VM have carried out network improvements that have solved the problem (but check that your BQM is tracking your current IP address - when they carry out network changes it's common for IP addresses to change, and if that's the case you need to manually edit your BQM settings).  In the past I've seen my BQM both dramatically improve and dramatically worsen, only to discover that my IP address had changed and was then tracking a better or worse connection.

Now, assuming that the BQM IP is correct, your problem of poor network performance has been going on since (at least) January, so we get round to the question of compensation, unless you've already been made and accepted an offer/discount?  If there's nothing been offered, or a miserly one off discount, then I'd be looking for half of the broadband charges refunded for the period since you first raised this with VM.  There's a legal basis for this, and chances are you'd have to run through a formal complaint process with VM and then involve the industry complaints adjudicator, so what's the situation?

[jamiehunt90]

Yes my IP is correct and the performance has dramatically improved. I'm still trying to find the root cause of the issue but I seem to just get the standard response of 'there was an SNR issue in the area'. I've had these issues going back a few years now and countless engineers have said there were SNR issues which are now resolved yet there was never an improvement to the latency. All of the responses from the on-site visits have suggested that VM do not offer any guarantees around latency, only speeds, however surely it is still classed as a degraded service? I would also have thought that if these SNR issues are that common and VM believe them to be the cause of the issue that we would be compensated for each issue that is logged. We've had no conversation around compensation as yet.  

[Molly_T]

Hi Jamie, thanks for coming back to update the thread. 

I can appreciate your frustration after reading your comments regarding your experience over the last few years. There's a few things I'd like to address here to offer help. 

• Firstly, I'm going to give a little bit of extra information about SNR issues which will hopefully provide further context as to why you may often get a standard response: 
  SNR (signal to noise ratio) is just a technical term for interference of the Broadband signal caused by noise which ingresses on to our network. It's a difficult problem to locate and diagnose because noise can ingress anywhere on the network. As a general rule it's normally caused by customer equipment e.g. loose connections or 3rd party equipment attached to our network. However it can also be attributable to local architecture, e.g street cabinets, cabling or at the origin of the signal which we call the Headend (servers/routing system). 
  The only way to establish where the noise is originating is for the Network Techs to run a series of trace routes. Once found then the cause dictates the amount of work required and the time frame for resolution. On this basis it would be difficult for us to provide detailed information to customers about where, when and why an SNR issue has occurred. 
• Secondly the latency issues - would you mind just confirming for us that these are still ongoing? I've had a look on our systems but sadly we can't identify any issues as your hub is in Modem mode. We would need you to pop the hub back into Router mode in order for us to collect data and run testing to confirm these latency issues. In the meantime, it would be good to get some extra information from you about how the latency presents itself at your end - is it happening when online gaming, or on specific devices? Does it happen at any specific times?
• Regarding compensation - we do have an auto-comp policy which automatically applies compensation for outage issues where customers are eligible. You can read more about it here: https://virg.in/autocomp, however if you feel that you are looking for further compensation or a good will gesture which you have not received, we will need to raise a complaint. This way we can ensure there is a record of your feedback and what you are looking for as a resolution, complete an investigation into what has happened and then offer a resolution to you. If you haven't raised a complaint already and would like to do so, please let us know and we will send you a PM to offer further support with this. 

I hope this all helps, please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns I have not addressed above, and if we can help further with the latency issues or raising a complaint. 
All the best!