Moved house and back to square one.

[TikTak]

Hello all.

So some time ago I posted in here with issues for gaming/streaming with the SH3, not knowing if this was the area, the hub etc etc. Link here. 

A good 18 months, 15+ visits, 4 new Superhubs, 2 complaints and £20 off a month it finally settled down to a decent level although I'm still not sure what actually fixed it, it just started working one day.

As great as that was, 6 months later I've moved house, had all new equipment and rather frustratingly, 2 months of issues. General browsing is fine but as we all know, we are working from home and video calls can be all over the place. Gaming, the main use in this house is also up and down.

Having a read around the forum it looks like this was never resolved on a huge scale, people appear to be having issues everywhere.

So here I am to start this again ...

Typical BQM (from Friday)

And because it's not as accurate as our monitoring system at work, a snip from PRTG (the packet loss is a joke).

[Lee_R]

HI TiKTak.  

I am really sorry this issue is ongoing. Please can you clarify whether or not this is impacting all aspects of your using the internet?  

Regards

Lee_R

[TikTak]

Yeah. It does. 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz, cabled, streaming, video calls, gaming. One device. Multiple devices. All the same. All suffering packet loss.

Got another reply "resolving" my complaint. Said they understand I'm unhappy with the price increase and to call customer support. Helpful ... 

I mean yes that is one aspect of everything. Paying £20 a month more per month than I did 6-7 years ago for the SAME package isn't great. But at least back then it worked and is by no means the bulk of the issue here ... 

[Andrew-G]

Have VM admitted this is an over-utilisation fault?  I see fault references in the thread, and the accumulated BQMs point that way, but (unless I've skimmed past it) there's not been an admission that this is a capacity/congestion issue?

And are you aware of the company's track record on fixing that type of fault?

[John_GS]

Hi TikTak

Regarding your account price, please either call us on 150 // 0345 454 1111 or text us on 07533051809 and we can check your account for offers. Text replies are not instant and are automated at the start to get you through to the right team.

I have checked the systems and there's no congestion affecting the service.

Kind regards,

[Andrew-G]

@TikTak I'd suggest you don't renegotiate your contract until the performance issue is resolved, otherwise you'll be locked in for another 18 months, and whilst you can exit without penalty if the connection remains poor, it can sometimes be a fair bit of hassle to do so.  If you still intend to renegotiate, then at least prepare yourself beforehand - not all applies for you, but some ideas in the post linked below:

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Networking-and-WiFi/can-you-downgrade-package-without-using-the...

[TikTak]

Thanks for the pointers Andrew. Was definitely not planning on resigning at this point. 😅

As an IT professional and a customer of well over 10 year's I realise and totally accept there is never going to be 100% uptime.

What winds me up is the lack of transparency (as mentioned no actual admission of what's going on, just some "faults") and the fact I've had 4 or so replies to my complaint (Local fault, try a cable, call us about your bill, and today's electrical interference email) but literally nothing actually addressing what I put in my complaint or the issues I'm actually having. Not sure how VM think recommending the self help this many months into an issue is acceptable, it's quite embarrassing. 

Will speak to the tech team again as soon as I have a chance just to keep jumping through the hoops. In the words of Arnie, I'll be back.

[TikTak]

Hello all, I'm back! 

Finally spoke to support yesterday and got told that the work done was a guaranteed to fix my issues.

He said we needed to "split the traffic out" and as far as I can tell all he did, without asking, was rename both my SSIDs which disconnected everyone working in the house. Really helpful. 

Guess what? No change whatsoever. 

Next? 

[Paulina_Z]

Hi @TikTak,

Thank you for getting back yo us about your ongoing issue. I'm really sorry to hear that this problem is not resolved yet.

After looking into your account, I can see that the Hub has not been rebooted in over two weeks. Would you be able to give it a quick reboot in order to see if the split channels help after the reboot?

Please keep us updated on this issue further if you can.

Thanks!

[Andrew-G]

@Paulina_Z Take a look at the BQM chart in @TikTak 's first post.  This is an over-utilisation problem, and the hub works perfectly well during the quiet hours from half past midnight to about 9 am.  So it the hub works fine during the small hours of the morning, then rebooting the hub, resetting the hub, replacing the hub won't make a blind bit of difference.  The remote fumbling with wifi by the telephone support agents won't make any difference either, because the problem doesn't have anything to do with wifi. 

This is a network capacity constraint caused by VM over-selling relative to local network capacity.  And judging by other people's experience, if there's no over-utilisation fault showing, it will be about four months before VM admit the problem, and then a year or more before they fix it, if indeed they ever do.  

[Sasha_W]

Hi @TikTak, 

I have gone through some further checks on our systems and have raised this with the network faults team so they can investigate further into this.

Once I get a reply from them I will keep you updated and hopefully we should have a successful response. 

Thank you so much for your patience 🙂 

We should hopefully get back to you as soon as we hear back from our team 🙂 

Thanks