Erratic Latency Makes Online Gaming Impossible

[LyndaAllen57]

I have been experiencing issues for over 6 months, longer really, with high and erratic latency throughout the day causing packet loss whilst playing online games e.g. CS:GO & Assetto Corsa.  The issue has been reported multiple times to Virgin and engineers have been out and said it's an instrastructure issue, not a problem between the cable modem and cabinet.  There has never been any traction in raising the ongoing problem to the field support team!

I've been running a Think Broadband monitor to the Virgin Router for quite some time and it shows the eratic nature of the pings throughout the day, whether I'm using the network or not.  Virgin appear not to be able to accept any images or links to the data for them to be able to see the issue themselves!

Here are two graphs from 6th July, of mine and a colleague's broadband monitors.

A friend who live a mile away is experiencing the same issues with his Virgin connection.  His graph almost follows mine exactly.  We do get messages at the same time when work is being undertaken in the area so assume we are sharing some infrastructure.

However another friend in Virgin, who lives closer, only quarter of a mile away, experiences none of these spikes!  They do not get the messages about scheduled work so must be on different infrastructure to us.  There is definitely some issue with some shared infrastructure but Virgin do not appear to be able to, or want to identify the problem. We are all on the same cable service M200.

I have had to resort to switching to a separate 4G router to play any latency dependant online games, which is costing me money!  The Assetto Corsa racing that I do for a couple of hours each week only uses about 50MB of data over the whole 2 hours period (8pm-10pm), and the Virgin network cannot handle that, even if that is the only traffic being generated over my network at that time!

I've now had to raise another complaint and the network will now be monitored for 30 Days to check if they are not maintaining the guaranteed broadband speed, so that I can cancel my contract!  Speed is not the issue, latency is!

Anyone else managed to get Virgin to resolved an intermittent infrastructure latency issue without resorting to moving to another ISP?

[jbrennand · Accepted solution]

Your BQM and description has a whiff of "overutilisation" about it.

I will ask VM to comment. But for background info see this thread re. over-utilisation and Andrew’s comments in Message 20

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Networking-and-WiFi/Internet-keeps-dropping-for-several-minutes...

[Adri_G]

Hi there LyndaAllen57,

Thanks so much for posting with your issue here on our forum page.
We are sorry to see you have had performance issues recently, happy to assist with this.

To enable me to help further I will send you a PM here, shortly.
Please check the top-right corner of our forum and you should see a purple envelope. 
Click this and you'll see my message.

[dmb001291]

I'm experiencing EXACTLY the same issue and am the person referenced in the above post as living a mile away.  I can provide links to similar graphs to the ones above if they would help diagnose a problem (as it's becoming almost impossible to play any sort of online game). 

Is there any way that the two issues can be linked?  The nature of the graphs surely shows there's some sort of link somewhere that isn't in our houses!

[Paul_DN]

Hi dmb001291,

Thank you for reaching out to us in our community and welcome, sorry to hear you are also facing latency issues which is causing issues while gaming, so I can help I will send you an invite into a private chat, once received please click on the purple envelope to accept.

Regards

Paul.

[Paul_DN]

Hi dmb001291,

Thank you for joining me in a private chat and for clearing security, as advised a technician is now booked for you, you can view and manage the appointment Via your Online Account if you do need any help in the meantime please do not hesitate to reach back out.

Regards

Paul.

[Paul_DN]

You will have to be there when the technician coms however as advised you can reschedule Via your online account.

Regards

Paul.

[dmb001291]

Hi Paul, the engineer has been and I've given it a few days but gaming on Friday was again very bad.  As you can see from this latency graph I'm still getting latency (remember this isn't internal to my network this is pinging my router directly from the think broadband broadband monitor)

The engineer advised he would write up a report of his findings and also try to link it to LyndaAllens issue so they could be investigated together.

I wonder if you can advise if there's been any further progress?

[Tom_W1]

Hi @dmb001291 thanks a lot for your reply - sorry you're still having issues.

Unfortunately, we can't see the photo you've posted as this has been rejected by moderators, kindly repost this but without any sensitive information such as IP address for example.

In terms of what we can see, all looks as it should do which would mean no issues have been identified and in all honesty, your logs look perfect from my side and have done since your visit.

We can see that since the visit, there have been 0 disconnections and this is a huge improvement than what it was pre-visit.

Please re-post your picture as advised and how have things been since your post?

Many thanks

[dmb001291]

Hi Tom,

Here's the photo again -

The latency was once again terrible last night and you can see that around 10pm.  I've also go the share link here -

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/75988cc86b028650909e6415cc177951adb5e4ca-20-08-2022

 Once more LyndaAllen was having exactly the same problems at exactly the same time.

Darren