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?
Hi, I live in between the two customers who are having these issues. However I am on a different part of the network - I know this because I get maintenance alerts at different times to them. Also because their connection is rubbish and mine isn't.
This is my BQM graph for today - not brilliant, but perfectly usable:
By contrast here is DMB's:
As he and LyndaAllen have stated many times, this is a measure of quality to the hub, and not of the wiring within the house. All three of us are seasoned IT professionals who know how to build and diagnose local networks, so we wouldn't be raising this as an issue if it was something internal to our premises.
The issue has not been resolved.
Conversations with the Virgin moderators are still ongoing and the problems are still present in our locality on the Halifax Virgin Media infrastructure for both myself and the customer DMB001291 below. We both are experiencing the same issue with erratic latency making online gaming in the evening, 'peak times', impossible. I have to disconnect my gaming PC from the Virgin router and onto a 4G router which uses the EE mobile network, to be able to play SIM racing games on an evening. So far the Virgin network team can see no issues and have no explanation for the erratic latency being logged by the BQM monitors that both I and customer DMB001291 run constantly!
Past 24 hours for me
Past 24 hours for DMB001291
Very similar graphs, even though we live a mile apart! But there's no common network issue according to the Virgin Network team?
And as a control for the BQM monitoring service, another Virgin broadband 'Gamer', experiencing no issue, but living about half way between the two problem locations has a 24 hour BQM graph like below!
I'll see if I get a response from the Network Team, via the moderator, to my query re what could be causing the discrepancy!
I thought I'd post an update on how my gaming was this evening - bad from 10pm and unplayable from 10.45pm. I took a snapshot of my broadband quality monitor graph at the time for posterity and you can see how bad the lag and latency was. In game my pings went up from approx 10 to 250 and stayed there.
Basically the service was unusable from 10.45pm. I don't know if this helps you diagnose the problem but thought I'd post it. PS, SteveMitch was playing at the same time and had NONE of these problems.
