WV11 - Area 04 - High Utilisation?

[Swinder]

Another year and another bout of what appears to be high utilisation in my area... Coincides with the recently launched Gig1 service funnily enough.

Speeds and latency impacted mainly around peak times hence me assuming high utilisation. Typically the same time every night with it worsening as we head into the weekend. Week on week it is worse, to the point where I am being kicked from various game servers due to such volatile latency.

Speedtest net shows decent speeds, however Thinkbroadband speedtest indicates very fluctuating speeds and ultimately latency which is backed up by the BQM below. In weeks gone by there was also notable packet loss but that isn't noticeable currently.

Downstream bonded channels
Channel	Frequency (Hz)	Power (dBmV)	SNR (dB)	Modulation	Channel ID
1	427000000	1.4	40	256 qam	37
2	267000000	2.7	40	256 qam	17
3	275000000	2.4	40	256 qam	18
4	283000000	2.9	40	256 qam	19
5	291000000	2.7	40	256 qam	20
6	299000000	3.2	40	256 qam	21
7	307000000	3	40	256 qam	22
8	315000000	3	40	256 qam	23
9	323000000	2.7	40	256 qam	24
10	331000000	2.9	40	256 qam	25
11	339000000	2.5	40	256 qam	26
12	347000000	2.7	40	256 qam	27
13	355000000	2.2	40	256 qam	28
14	363000000	2.4	40	256 qam	29
15	371000000	2	40	256 qam	30
16	379000000	2.2	40	256 qam	31
17	387000000	1.9	40	256 qam	32
18	395000000	2	40	256 qam	33
19	403000000	1.7	40	256 qam	34
20	411000000	1.9	40	256 qam	35
21	419000000	1.5	40	256 qam	36
22	435000000	1	40	256 qam	38
23	443000000	0.7	40	256 qam	39
24	451000000	1.2	40	256 qam	40


Downstream bonded channels
Channel	Locked Status	RxMER (dB)	Pre RS Errors	Post RS Errors
1	Locked	40.3	182	0
2	Locked	40.3	237	12
3	Locked	40.3	259	33
4	Locked	40.3	199	15
5	Locked	40.3	217	0
6	Locked	40.3	256	12
7	Locked	40.9	205	57
8	Locked	40.3	225	14
9	Locked	40.9	238	0
10	Locked	40.3	223	0
11	Locked	40.3	279	3
12	Locked	40.3	199	10
13	Locked	40.3	228	0
14	Locked	40.3	206	0
15	Locked	40.3	263	0
16	Locked	40.3	237	0
17	Locked	40.9	250	0
18	Locked	40.3	250	0
19	Locked	40.3	230	13
20	Locked	40.9	233	0
21	Locked	40.3	247	0
22	Locked	40.3	222	0
23	Locked	40.3	261	0
24	Locked	40.3	177	0

Upstream bonded channels
Channel	Frequency (Hz)	Power (dBmV)	Symbol Rate (ksps)	Modulation	Channel ID
1	39400000	44.5	5120	64 qam	4
2	46200000	44.3	5120	64 qam	3
3	53700000	45	5120	64 qam	2
4	60300004	45.3	5120	64 qam	1


Upstream bonded channels
Channel	Channel Type	T1 Timeouts	T2 Timeouts	T3 Timeouts	T4 Timeouts
1	ATDMA	0	0	10	0
2	ATDMA	0	0	10	0
3	ATDMA	0	0	10	0
4	ATDMA	0	0	9	0

If a rep could investigate and advise accordingly it would be greatly appreciated.

[Andrew-G]

The "clean" result between 12:30am and 9am is pretty telling, but the BQM looks as though it might be marginal by VM's standards.  If the staff confirm that it is over-utilisation then that's cut and dried, if they don't it doesn't mean it isn't.

Either way, if you're a gamer, it looks like your only fix is to switch back to Openreach.

[Swinder]

Admittedly this is tame compared to previous years, however I know this tends to get a lot worse so I am hoping the earlier it gets flagged the sooner they can fix it again for another year... that or release me from my contract and allow me to jump ship as soon as something better comes along.

As for Openreach providers, I ran Sky alongside Virgin briefly last year but had to terminate their service as it was pretty poor where I live, hitting just 22Mb/s during peak.

CityFibre completed their installation in my area last year so I was hoping to jump to whoever provides that, however there hasn't been any further news so I am stuck.

[Andrew-G]

There are instances of customers managing to pressure VM to fix over-utilisation faults, but the essential requirement is to be relentlessly polite but even more relentlessly tenacious and persistent.  Every time you get fobbed off, or told it is being looked into, or a fix date is given, you need to chase VM up promptly.  Get the forum staff to make the Area Field Manager's life a misery, get them to pester the Networks team so that they wish they'd never taken the job at VM.  If there's a missed fix date, escalate each missed fix to the CEO complaints team, and if that doesn't get a result, take each one further with CISAS (in the short term the CEO complaints team can't order operations to fix the fault, but it is about raising the pressure, and keeping it applied).

VM do spend tens of millions of pounds a year fixing capacity problems, but that's not enough to quickly fix all problems.  There's a set budget, so what you need to do is to ensure that your area has its priority raised.  And if there's no existing over-utilisation fault, step one is to handbag VM into admitting that there is a problem.  Consider how far you'll let the company piffle around sending out field technicians - you know, I know, VM know that field techs can't resolve network capacity issues, but letting the company go through the pantomime of pretending it is a noise problem is a regular way of obfuscating and delaying.  That isn't an intentional thing, but it's a way that a VM employee can parcel a difficult issue off on somebody else, hoping that the problem goes away (example here).   

[hortonj88]

That definitely looks like utilisation.


That aside, Virgin Media isn't known as a "gamer friendly" ISP.

Partly due to how DOCSIS works and the poor capacity they have on their network as a whole.


If you want stable latency in gaming you're better off with an Openreach ISP or a fibre altnet like CityFibre or Hyperoptic if they're available in your area.

I don't know what part of Wolverhampton WV11 is but Cityfibre appear to be building in Wolverhampton

https://www.cityfibre.com/news/cityfibre-begins-digital-transformation-public-sector-sites-wolverham...

[John_GS]

Hi Swinder

Thanks for posting. 

Sorry to hear of the broadband issues. I've ran some checks and there is no congestion showing, no outages, all the levels are fine etc. 

The hub has been up for a few weeks, can we try a reboot and our PIN reset for me on this, plus making sure all the coax cables are fully hand tight and we'll proceed from there.

Kind regards,

[Andrew-G]

@Swinder you'll have to go along with this as part of VM's protocols for fault finding, although it is clear that if any of those measures would work, then the hub wouldn't be showing a perfectly normal connection between 12:30am and 8:00am. 

As soon as you've tried those, let the BQM run another 24 hours, and if (as I expect) there's no improvement then request the forum staff have this be escalated to the networks team to explain why your connection has very poor latency at peak times, and what exactly they are going to do about it.  And "what they are going to do about it" needs to be a description of planned action on the local network, not the usual made up O-U fix dates plucked out of the air.