Impossible to use this internet

[enrey]

I lose connections every 20 minutes, sometimes I get a full blown outage usually around midnight, some days 20-30 minutes of downtime, packet loss..

Had a technician come over, who did nothing except looked at the area maintenances and told me there's nothing he can do.

I should apparently wait, according to his words, it usually takes few months to resolve, but sometimes up to a year...

Really...

That's gotta get me out of having to pay the cancellation fees, right?

[bc2020]

I can second that, NW3 London, Virgin has been the worst ISP I have ever had, this past week has been atrocious! I am looking to leave, just gaming now, and for 20 seconds, downtime! Then back on again, Virgin Modem tells me it's connected, clearly not! Always some issues with their network it seems, I am also in contract and I spoke to them, they told me to give it this weekend, if no improvement, then I can push to leave without any early termination fees! 

[Kath_F]

Hi enrey,

Thanks for taking the time to contact us via the Community. It's lovely having you on board with us in the Forums. ⭐

We're sorry to hear about the issues you have been having with your broadband connection. 😔

Checking our systems, I can see that there is a fault open that is affecting you. The details of that are here: 

• ➡ Fault reference number: F010668048
• ➡ Estimated fix time: 11 MAY 2023 12:55
• ➡ Description: You might find that your Virgin Fibre, Voice and Virgin TV services are intermittent, with the picture freezing or disappearing now and then. We are sorry and our engineers are working hard to resolve this for you.

The outage is an SNR outage - SNR (signal to noise ratio). This 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. This is because noise can ingress anywhere on our 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 he amount of work required and the time frame for resolution. 

There is a note of this on your account so the relevant teams are aware you are affected and this will ensure the account is assessed automatically for automatic compensation once the fault is closed as resolved. You can view more information on this, as well as the eligibility criteria here 👉 Automatic Compensation

If there is anything else we can do, let us know. 😊

Thanks,

[enrey]

I understand that this fault was estimated to be completed on 11th of May, but it's now 13th and my internet still looks like this:

It's been looking like this for few weeks now, some days quite a bit worse. But the issues slowly started to creep up few months ago.

Also, a signal/noise seems like a layer 1 issue on ISO/OSI model, which means this should not propagate past any router, switch or repeater, so, the home equipment that's on the copper wires shouldn't affect the fiber. And, since a traceroute is a layer 3 tool, I don't see how that would help diagnose this kind of a problem.

I may be misunderstanding this, but something doesn't add up.

Also, lot of the packet loss seem to be exactly 1 or exactly 2 hours apart, which seems a bit too predictable for a signal/noise issue anyway. Looks more like an overly enthusiastic cronjob to me.

I appreciate the details though.

In any case, I need a solid and reasonable ETA, and while I do appreciate the token gesture in the form of a 8% discount for the next month's bill as a compensation that I've been sent, I shall have you know that if I said that I'd much rather have this fixed, I'd be making a gross understatement.

[enrey]

Here's wed->sat of this week:

[Daniel_Et]

Hi @enrey, thank you for your response.

We're sorry to hear you're continuing to experience problems with your broadband service 😔

How have things been since you last posted? Also, have you tried checking your service status to make sure the outage has definitely passed? You can do so by clicking here.

Please pop back to us whenever you're ready.

Regards,
Daniel

[enrey]

Still the same.

I've been clicking that outage testing button for the last few months and the outcome was pretty random, sometimes there is an outage, sometimes there isn't, sometimes it's trying to tell me that there's no outage while it's struggling to load that page.

Watching the outages doesn't seem to be very reliable. The outages come and go, they get reported to me as "fixed", nothing improves, and few days later, another outage appears, with not much changing in the quality of the connection.

Tomorrow a technician will come to have a look at it. Last time a technician was here, I've been told that there's nothing he can do and that the fault will probably keep coming back as the other technicians are trying to sort it out, and I need to wait several months or up to a year.

Obviously, that's unacceptable.

[Daniel_Et]

Hi @enrey, thank you for your response.

We're sorry to hear you feel this way 😔

How did yesterday's technician appointment go? Have you seen any improvements on the back of it?

Regards,
Daniel

[Kattivix]

Same here..every day and even at night loosing internet for 5-10 min. I already set another contract with EE. They dont have high speed..but at least they have connections and internet stability without crashing every fkn day. Disappointed by Virgin.

[enrey]

Technician was good, but it's still not fixed.

Well, technician came and I asked again, as usual, if it could be anything to do with my neighbours getting an internet from virgin, because the issues started around the time when my neighbours got their connection.

He told me that no, it's a different cable. After me asking again, if there's any way there could be interference, he said the only way it could be is if they spliced my cable. Went to check it, and yea.

So, my neighbour's virgin media technician put a T junction on my cable without checking whether my internet is still works afterwards.

My cable had to have a 6db attenuator on it before, but after the T junction was added, it fell out of spec.

So, the technician gave me a 3db attenuator and said that this should help, and it did.

...for about half a day:

But the same night, it went bonkers again, with some cutouts in the morning and small residual packet loss throughout the afternoon of the next day.

Day after, the small dips are starting to ramp up again...

And saturday with a bit of sunday... 3 total shutdowns, with some packet loss in between.

I've received about 3 messages this week saying there was a maintenance and that my internet "should be fixed now"....

When there's maintenance every two days, at one point, you guys have to call it a major ongoing maintenance that lasts months (which it does), and not series of back-to-back 2 day long fixes. 

And if you don't know how long it takes to fix, you have to admit that you don't know how long it's going to take to fix it.

Anyway, it is a bit of an improvement, the small packet loss every hour is a bit more managable when they only last few seconds instead of a minute, but it is still a packet loss and the major ones are still here.