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Moving to BT FTTP

darmo
Up to speed

After years of suffering gaming on VM with its inherent latency issues (DOCSIS). The price increase announced today has finally given me a free out, coupled with great offers on BT FTTP 500 right now, I decided to ditch virgin and switch. 3rd April will be when I’m up and running with BT FTTP. I will post my BQM charts here a few days after the switch. I’m looking forward to playing COD how it should be played finally. 

43 REPLIES 43

darmo
Up to speed

@IPFreely Well it appears you are in one of the VM Project Mustang area's hence why your latency is as such (5-6ms XGSPON), good for you, and good for West Yorkshire my home county, but you are in the marginal minority of VM customers with FTTP via VM, the rest will be hopefully all upgraded by 2028.

As for your claim of DOCIS being on average just 2-4ms above Openreach FTTP and just 1ms more in LLD....the reality (as demonstrated by many many peoples BQM's charts in this forum) is that a typical virgin media area is gonna have a base line between 12-20ms with constant and varying spikes anywhere upto 60, predictably higher at peak times. Where are BQM charts from people on openreach in this forum are showing around 5-10ms green, no blue or yellow on their charts. So yes i agree it's possible the VM retentions guy was confused, perhaps he wasn't aware that i'm not a marginal minority customer in an area such as yours but actually part of the vast majority of VM customers still serviced via copper coaxial and DOCSIS 3.0 tech. When such areas are also served by Openreach network It's no surprise people are moving (mostly gamers since we are the ones most sensitive to latency). And this is a good thing for competition and consumers, if this was just a couple years ago, despite the price increase and **bleep**ty gaming, i would still have no choice but to stick with VM, unless i wanted to go to DSL. Now, i have options.

@Andrew-G you said  "There is a downside to proper FTTP of course, and that's when you get splatted in CoD or CSGO, you can no longer blame Virgin Media." 

Ain't that the truth! Will have to blame my hardware/drivers instead, game updates, Biden, or the weather!


@darmo wrote:

@IPFreely Well it appears you are in one of the VM Project Mustang area's hence why your latency is as such (5-6ms XGSPON), good for you, and good for West Yorkshire my home county, but you are in the marginal minority of VM customers with FTTP via VM, the rest will be hopefully all upgraded by 2028.

As for your claim of DOCIS being on average just 2-4ms above Openreach FTTP and just 1ms more in LLD....the reality (as demonstrated by many many peoples BQM's charts in this forum) is that a typical virgin media area is gonna have a base line between 12-20ms with constant and varying spikes anywhere upto 60, predictably higher at peak times. Where are BQM charts from people on openreach in this forum are showing around 5-10ms green, no blue or yellow on their charts. So yes i agree it's possible the VM retentions guy was confused, perhaps he wasn't aware that i'm not a marginal minority customer in an area such as yours but actually part of the vast majority of VM customers still serviced via copper coaxial and DOCSIS 3.0 tech. When such areas are also served by Openreach network It's no surprise people are moving (mostly gamers since we are the ones most sensitive to latency). And this is a good thing for competition and consumers, if this was just a couple years ago, despite the price increase and **bleep**ty gaming, i would still have no choice but to stick with VM, unless i wanted to go to DSL. Now, i have options.

@Andrew-G you said  "There is a downside to proper FTTP of course, and that's when you get splatted in CoD or CSGO, you can no longer blame Virgin Media." 

Ain't that the truth! Will have to blame my hardware/drivers instead, game updates, Biden, or the weather!


I'm in a Mustang trial area. I don't have VM and there's no VM cabling to my home. If there were it wouldn't be XGSPON, it'd be an inverted node and RFoG. Note the BQM was headed 'YouFibre'.

The 2-4 ms is factual. Perhaps you should've read up on DoCSIS as you suggested the VM guy should, then you'd know about the latency of the request-grant-transmit cycle. 4 ms give or take for a request on its own, going down to 2 if the request is encapsulated with an earlier transmission and is well timed as far as the next upstream MAP goes. All dependent on what VM's upstream MAP frequency is: I believe it's 4 ms. 

As we're just talking about Openreach going into individual ISPs' network latency wouldn't be fair. BT are exceptionally low, some others are way higher. Given you're quoting total latency on VM as 12-20ms this is probably noteworthy. My Openreach FTTP, I've two connections, the Openreach FTTP has 6 ms higher latency than the YouFibre link, and the latency is nothing to do with FTTP, much as the higher latency seen on VM BQMs in areas that are working outside of the 2-4 ms of DoCSIS delay is nothing to do with DoCSIS. VM's network follows their cable network, it's not as direct as BT's. It can also take some interesting paths as a result of being partially moved behind Liberty Global's Aorta network, AS 6830. I've personally mentioned these strange paths to VM and how they might give people the wrong impression of their service even if it's just the network the BQM is hosted on, Netconnex AS 21396. Far from unknown for traffic rather than taking the direct path across the LINX LAN to go via transit and sometimes be taken via Amsterdam.

Your Network+ covered BGP and discussed things like peering LANs, PNIs, NNIs, transit, etc, right?

Most people move due to price or generally bad network or WiFI quality, sometimes TV or phone services are an influence. They couldn't care less about a few milliseconds of latency. There aren't an army of gamers outraged over slightly higher latency: if there were they wouldn't be on VM at all, they'd be on FTTC as it has lower and more stable latency much of the time. This army of super educated users chose to trade latency for download speeds as there's literally no other reason to go for VM.

If you're more curious about DoCSIS and want to learn the documentation from Cablelabs is an obvious source, https://www.dslreports.com/forums/all is also very useful - you can see lots of DoCSIS connections that hit their first hop, the only part that DoCSIS is concerned with, in 5 ms.

Technical jargon as you're an expert. Given your comments to the VM call centre guy I'm sure you understand every word and maybe can pick holes in some.


@IPFreely wrote:

Awful for CS:Go. No flux capacitor powered QoS / BWM right now. My bufferbloat must be off the scale.

Might limit it to 56k, just to be sure.

More seriously latency is not as low as some as everything goes through Manchester but it's very stable. If you'd care to see the setup carrying the traffic I'll pop some network porn in showing the two cabinets in a bit. 


HXnkb8G.md

HXnkyu4.md

As promised cabling's a mess but 3 routers, 4 switches, 2 Raspberry Pis. A server is the 4th router and does some 'interesting' routing work when required. Joys of a lab mixing with a home network. 1, 10 and 25 Gbit network kit to try and keep everything flowing smoothly with no contention. If I were to degrade the WiFi to the home I'd be in real trouble!


@Andrew-G wrote:

We keep on being told this (ie about Low Latency DOCSIS) by non-official posters, but the simple reality is that it was announced as a standard in 2019 but it's not been delivered yet, and there's no sign of it being delivered. 


LLD is still in its deployment infancy. The big US operator Comcast is only now (soon) starting a public trial, if that can make you less worried. There is still time for VM to deploy it. 🙂

ravenstar68
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

IP addresses can be considered personal information under the GDPR if they can be linked with other information to identify an individual.

Be aware as well that if you have an IP address, then GeoIP providers can provide a rough location for you, (although it's by no means 100% accurate, I'm currently on BT ad when the IP address changes to one particular range, Geo IP puts me in London - As I'm now up in the Highlands, we might say the data is a little off in that case ;)).

t's definitely far better not to share your IP address online if you can help it.

I'm a Very Insightful Person, I'm here to share knowledge, I don't work for Virgin Media. Learn more

Have I helped? Click Mark as Helpful Answer or use Kudos to say thanks

darmo
Up to speed

@IPFreely said: I'm in a Mustang trial area. I don't have VM and there's no VM cabling to my home. If there were it wouldn't be XGSPON, it'd be an inverted node and RFoG. Note the BQM was headed 'YouFibre'.

ResponseMy misunderstanding, yes i meant RFoG for mustang areas and assumed that's what you are using. Noted you are using YouFibre, which seems like some sort of insane set up way beyond the needs of a home user, or even a SME.

 

@IPFreely said: The 2-4 ms is factual. Perhaps you should've read up on DoCSIS as you suggested the VM guy should, then you'd know about the latency of the request-grant-transmit cycle. 4 ms give or take for a request on its own, going down to 2 if the request is encapsulated with an earlier transmission and is well timed as far as the next upstream MAP goes. All dependent on what VM's upstream MAP frequency is: I believe it's 4 ms. 

Response:Yes, fully read up and aware of this. You are defending VM's network technology based on theoretical and best case scenario conditions which is a far cry from the real world. Mercedes says a C350e has an official fuel-efficiency figure of 134.5mpg yet in the real world people only get around 40mpg, this analogy is applicable to VM network and DoCSIS latency.

 

@IPFreely said: My Openreach FTTP, I've two connections, the Openreach FTTP has 6 ms higher latency than the YouFibre link, and the latency is nothing to do with FTTP, much as the higher latency seen on VM BQMs in areas that are working outside of the 2-4 ms of DoCSIS delay is nothing to do with DoCSIS. VM's network follows their cable network, it's not as direct as BT's.

ResponseFirstly the VM BQM's we see working outside the 2-4ms of DoCSIS delay is coincidently a huge number of customers i would confidently say over 98% of the customers. so everyone. I understand that you are saying DoCSIS is not entirely to blame (although RF over copper inherently does have jitter) and that the directness of the network matters perhaps more (and the quality of the infrastructure along the way). which i agree.

Taking all this into consideration, we can see why VM's network is poop. The path of your data is not very direct at all, a simple tracert command can reveal this. Couple this with poor implementation of DoCSIS technology, with bad hardware in their comms cabinets and customer routers, along with bad homecooked firmware on their CMTS. Couple this with the fact that CMTS's are overloaded and neighbourhood lines are oversubscribed. It all adds up to a pretty unusable connection for gamers at peak times, and barley passable at non peak times, and that's if you are in a 'good' VM area.

Contrast this with the much simpler and direct openreach network, coupled with it's fibre optics cabling which are immune to interference, and pretty much resistance free, with consistently lower latency built in, key word here being consistently. You can see why there is such a difference to the real world experience of VM and openreach customers as objectively proven by the many BQM's posted here. And this is the bottom line that matters, the real world, not theory. In theory there's nothing wrong with a Coaxial/DoCSIS network, but in reality, there's a lot wrong with it, that's noticeable, as felt by myself and thousands of people in this forum. 

Side Note FYI - You didn't hear this from me, but fibre optics (and silicon CPU's) were first discovered by humans when the US military recovered a downed Alien UFO in the 1950's and began investigating it, intelligence agency's then spun up companies like IBM with their 'R&D' departments so the technology could be introduced to society in a more subtle/slower/natural/believable way. bottom line is If fibre optics is good enough for advanced alien aircraft, its good enough for me, and is by far the most superior method of transmitting data along a cable currently present on earth.......and perhaps other more advanced planets too.

As for storage, the aliens use Crystal, otherwise known as 5D optical data storage to researchers on earth, although this 'new' 'discovery' is actually just a primitive 1st gen form of the Crystal tech that the aliens use. We are just begging to research it now, will probably be another 20 years before its mainstream, fully replacing Flash/HDD/Tape. But rest assured the intelligence agency's have known about it since at least the late 1960's. 

Who knows what pre-existing Alien tech will be granted to us under the guise of 'research discovery' or 'invention' beyond that.

 New 'Superman' crystals can store data for billions of years (cnn.com)

I could do a wall of text on all the issues with the responses but won't.

The pervading theme in your comments in this thread and others is that you don't really know what you're talking about: you've read some summaries and picked up a few bits largely from here on cable but most definitely do not understand the material in any depth and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. You didn't engage technically most of the time and where you to some extent tried to you missed the point and compared apples and oranges.

I just wanted to make sure my first impression was right: it was made when you flexed a junior level networking certification at a call centre worker and randomly spammed threads with nonsense.

Enjoy your FTTP. YouFibre is a small-ish but rapidly growing FTTP altnet by the way. All the best bouncing off the bottom of the valley of despair and ascending the slope of enlightenment: I'm not even half-way. 

DunningKrugar-1200x862


@ravenstar68 wrote:

IP addresses can be considered personal information under the GDPR if they can be linked with other information to identify an individual.

Be aware as well that if you have an IP address, then GeoIP providers can provide a rough location for you, (although it's by no means 100% accurate, I'm currently on BT ad when the IP address changes to one particular range, Geo IP puts me in London - As I'm now up in the Highlands, we might say the data is a little off in that case ;)).

t's definitely far better not to share your IP address online if you can help it.


I'm very aware of geolocation, hard not to be given advertising, and it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme. I don't really regard it as a major issue but duly noted that mileage may vary, especially if reverse DNS is customised. My bad, thanks for the reminder.

You first impression and subsequent impressions are completely wrong. I know very well what im talking about, maybe perhaps not to the technical depth that you do, but certainly more than an average person and certainly 10 times more than the dumb VM retention guy who was trying to BS me and failed.

You have failed to speak on the merits of my argument at a fundamental and practical level, and have instead tried to divert the conversation to extreme technicalities, only to perhaps flex your knowledge/ego in some weird way. But what use is your knowledge depth i ask, if not used in a practical sense......nothing.

What i DO know. practically. is that the service im leaving is inferior. and the one I'm moving to is superior. This was the point i was trying to stress to VM retention guy, but he was obviously trained never to listen to the customers, so my hand was unfortunately forced to put him in his rightful place, i can only hope he did in fact research coaxial/docsis and the difference to true FTTP using fibre optics after our call, and perhaps, with gods help, learnt something to make him better at job.

darmo
Up to speed

@IPFreely Said: ... and randomly spammed threads with nonsense.

Nothing nonsense about it, if a VM customer is having issues with latency effecting their gaming. There are truly only two options for them.

1) Get used to it

2) Leave move to FTTP

The numerous threads and posts in this forum very much prove this. We have all upgraded our routers, we have all had engineers come out and tinker, yet, the poor BQM's persist, meaning my two options above, are TRULY the ONLY OPTIONS for 95 plus % of VM customers.

I guess the third options is wait until VM upgrade their area to FTTP but that could be upto 2028 or more.