Apparent Hub 3.0 Freeze

[Rusk]

Hi All,

I became a customer recently (just a few months ago). So you are aware I am an IT engineer in several fields including networking and WiFi among other things. 

Trying here as it's very hard to get hold of VM in these times. I have an intermittent issue with my VM broadband. The internet will drop out randomly, I have troubleshooted but my explanation doesn't seem to be understood by the techs I've spoken to so far at VM.

The issue - with no pattern (I can tell anyway) my internet will drop out. WiFi stays connected for maybe another minute or so after the drop out but then no devices can connect any longer and the currently connected devices drop off a little while after that. Looking at the hub there are no red lights with only the normal white power light on. During this time of no internet but WiFi is still up I cannot browse to the hub and it will not respond to ping either. The fix is turning the hub off and on again (classic IT action of course). This leads me to feel it is a Hub issue not a WAN side issue. Perhaps the Hub crashing in some way. I've checked to logs in the GUI and it seems like nothing is stated there.

I said white light above but this is now, my first hub always had a yellow ish orange ish LED light. My second and current hub has white. More on that shortly.

VM response to far - A few weeks ago I managed to get a chat session with VM. I explained to them as above and also highlighted the yellow LED light which I thought was odd as it wasn't listed in the troubleshooting stuff on their website. Although they said they could send a new hub they didn't and referred my to a (more) technical person who would ring me. During that call I, again, explained as above and he thought it was a network issue not a hub issue ad he wanted to send a tech to the house. I thought sending a new hub would be a simple troubleshooting step and avoid contact with someone in the house during lockdown but ok fine.

Tech came, I explained everything, he said he would run his outside tests first to avoid coming in if he could. Tests came back fine so he came in and tested everything he could and also saw the yellow light on the hub and said that is was odd so replaced the hub for a new one. Unfortunately the issue was not occurring during his visit so we had no idea if that would fix it or not.

Before the hub was replaced the issue was happening every day, sometimes several times a day. With the replacement hub we went a good week before it started happening again. Now it is happening once or twice a week so no where near as bad but still happening. I am still feeling it is a hub issue as the failure is always the same order of events. As a side note this hub does seem to have some really poor WiFi performance. I'm really struggling to get signal in several places in my home. I was about to buy a new Mesh network and upgrade that way but then stopped when I remembered I'd still have to use the VM hub as a router and if there was a problem it would potentially remain.

I have just seen there is a new hub 4 and also thought, if this issue is a hub 3 issue, it might fix things for me and maybe improve WiFi at the same time. Fingers crossed VM will agree to add me to the new hub roll out!

Anyway this is very long but hopefully a few of you got through it and have seen similair issues or have some fixes for me to try. MY hub firmware is on 9.1.1811.401 and it is hardware version 11.

Thanks,

Russell

[Rusk]

Nope! My advice is give up on the hub and use it only as a modem. I bought a mesh WiFi system and since day one of turning that on and having the Virgin hub be only a modem I haven't had a single issue.

The Virgin hub is not fit for purpose when trying to be a modem and WiFi router and massively under spec'd. It works fine as a modem only. 

[lotharmat]

I agree! - Own router is definitely the way forward!

[SJMcG]

I've had a relatively stable performance for a couple of months since getting VM, and was hoping to avoid forking out for my own router if I could help it, but since getting this issue recently I've been googling and seems you're not the only one to have the issue without resolution. Shambles from VM.

Don't suppose you managed to negotiate a discount for having to pay for your own device just to receive a stable service?? 🤔

[lotharmat]

Alas - WiFi performance is not guaranteed at all! 😞

[SJMcG]

Not talking about guaranteed WiFi though (have my own APs anyway), just about the supplied router not hanging and taking to entire connection down!

[Adduxi]

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@SJMcG wrote:

Not talking about guaranteed WiFi though (have my own APs anyway), just about the supplied router not hanging and taking to entire connection down!

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VM only guarantee wired speeds at the Hub.  They will not give compensation for buying your own networking kit.

In all the years I've been with NTL/VM I've never used any of the supplied Superhubs/Hubs as Routers.  They go straight to Modem mode as I value my sanity too much 😉

[SJMcG]

My wired speed is zero when the hub freezes and goes down. 🙄

Thanks for the feedback everyone. May have to look for some options if this continues.

[Rusk]

Sadly that won't wash. I had the same argument but the first stage in their troubleshooting is a reboot which always fixes the issue. Nothing shows in the logs and they cannot seem to do any level of debug. I was annoyed I would have to buy my own gear but as a techie I soon realised just how bad the hub was and how much better my network can be with kit actually designed to run properly.

[Sasha_W]

Afternoon @SJMcG, 

Thanks for posting this on here, sorry to hear you're having some ongoing issues. 

Could you just expand on the issues that you're having so we can look into this further? 

What speeds are you currently getting? Is it still on 0? 

Have you carried out any other checks? I appreciate this may sound obvious but have you checked our service status page for any outages? 

Please do let us know so we can run some further checks 🙂 
 

Thanks 

[SJMcG]

Hi Sasha,

Thanks for the response.

I've had 3 outages in the past week-10 days. Each time the following appears to be the case:

• All Wifi connectivity goes down
• The hub is inaccessible (i.e. I can't ping it, or browse to the http interface)
• My device loses its IP and gets an APIPA address (169.254.x.x IP that a PC gives itself if the DHCP server isn't issuing an address)
• My thinkbroadband monitor doesn't show the internet connection is down

So the long and short is that I don't think the internet connection has gone down, it seems to be the Hub 3.0 freezing and locking up.

To fix it, I've just had to power cycle the hub and everything comes back after a few minutes. When I check the logs, there's nothing to indicate that anything happened around the time of the outage, again suggesting the hub is just hanging and it's not caused by any upstream issues that are getting logged before the outage occurs. Obviously this is my assumption and I can't say this for definite.

I have 2 other APs of my own and I can't connect to them either as the hub is the DHCP server so devices just can't get an IP. I have a few devices wired in, but I haven't specifically tested to confirm that they're working when this occurs, but I'm 99% sure they're not. If it happens again I'll test this immediately before rebooting the hub.

*************

In answer to your specific questions:

 1. No my speed isn't 0. It was a facetious comment to state that when things go down my connection is 0. The speeds are OK when the outage isn't happening.

2. Yes, I have checked the service status page and there's no known issues. As you can see from the above, it doesn't seem likely this is the cause anyway.

Thanks,

Sam