Constant dropouts throughout the day

[dasgus]

Hi,

For the past couple of weeks, I've started seeing an increasing number of dropouts on my internet. These normally last for a few seconds, but happen frequently.

We had an engineer visit on Saturday who provided us with a replacement Hub 3, and provided us with a signal booster as well to help, but this seems to have actually made things worse.

Today has been particularly bad, with both my partner and I finding it difficult to connect to work calls, and web pages failing to load properly. Prior to this starting we could both easily run video calls at the same time without issue.

Here is a BQM graph for the past 24 hours, but the scenario has looked pretty similar for the past fortnight.

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Angus

[newapollo]

Hi Angus,

Sorry to see you are still having issues despite an engineer visit.

I'm afraid you will need to repost your BQM as the original one contains your ip address which you will need to blank out.

You could also set up a live link which will take a few hours to get any kind of trend showing although you can post the link straight away.

Instructions for posting live BQM Link

Under your BQM graph are two links in red.

Click the lower link (Share Live Graph) then click generate.

Copy the text in the Direct Link box, beware, there may be more text than you can see.

On here click the Link icon (2 links chain to the left of the camera icon)

 In the URL box paste the link you copied and then click OK.

[dasgus]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the instructions, have set up a live link, which you can see below:

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/5234766d789d9fdd430b9d597d95538290... 

[Anonymous]

That looks dreadful with high latency and packetloss. Unfortunately it looks like it calms down overnight which points to over utilisation of the network in your area. One perhaps for the forum team to help with via an engineer specialist in this area. Don't hold your breath for a quick fix though. 

[dasgus]

So interestingly it's been quieter this morning, and now we'd hit midday it's started to drop out again. This matches up with what was has happened for the past couple of weeks. Fine in the morning, bad in the afternoon. Yesterday seems like an anomaly as being particularly bad for most of the day.

I can already see web pages failing to load and I'm having to retry them. I've also checked the router logs and at the time of the most recent dropouts I can see both:

RCS Partial Service
and 
SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Loss of Sync

It was fine later on yesterday evening, the last dropout was at around 19:40 with a similar error in the route logs. There does seem to be something causing network issues during the day.

[dasgus]

And we're back to having a bad morning with regularly dropouts.

Is there anything special I need to do to get some help, or are the forum team just ignoring me?

[Andrew-G]

No - the forum is not "first line response" for Virgin Media (that first line if you want a quicker response is the grim telephone support).  It can take a day or three for forum staff to pick things up and respond.  Looking at your BQM, it certainly isn't a utilisation (network congestion) problem, looks more like a problem with the gubbins in the street cabinet, possibly an amplifier overheating and malfunctioning.

[dasgus]

So an update so far:

Went via the technical support after finding a phone number, got another Engineer out this morning. He's replaced everything he could (apart from the Hub which was replaced on Sat), and went down to the cabinet and moved our connection - apparently we were on one designed for people living next to the cabinet.

He also mentioned that Virgin have change the ranges on their WiFi so we should look at getting a mesh set up instead in case that is causing the issue as well.

Will see how it goes today - so far so good - but we've had good starts before and it all falls over after lunch. Fingers crossed!

[Kath_F]

Hi dasgus, 

Thanks for your post and a big welcome to the Community. It's great having you on board with us. 

I'm really to hear you're having an issue with your connection. It's great you've been able to keep the thread updated and looking at the BQM, the live link looks pretty good for the last 24 hours. 

Hopefully this means things are resolved for you but it you do notice things going bad again, pop back and let us know. 

Apologies once again. 

Thanks, 

[dasgus]

Have given it a few days since the Engineer visited, and it's been a lot more stable now. Am not sure why it suddenly started dropping out in the first place, but am assuming the trip to the cabinet sorted it out in the end.

Will close this discussion off now, but thanks to everyone who previously chipped in with advice, helped prove I wasn't going mad!