Virgin Media Community

[SuperslowDy]

Hi

Last week I was getting packet loss in games and high ping, and my work software was constantly crashing. The connection would drop at times as well. I'm working from home and our software relies on a good connection, any packet loss at all means I need to relogin to all the software and I lose anything I've been doing. I've had to use USB tethering but I don't have unlimited 4g so I'm reaching the point I'll not be able to do any work.

Called up Virgin 14/1/21 and an engineer came round 20/1/21. He removed our attenuator, tightened some stuff up etc.

Unfortunately It's getting far worse, not better.

I went to the trouble of using Pingplotter and PRTG's Ping Jitter sensor and the results show a huge issue. The jitter gets up to 36/37ms at times. I'd say I won't be playing any Rocket League or FIFA this weekend unless I want to constantly lose! :

Latency gets up to 150ms and that jitter graph...

This is on a NIghthawk router today, wireless. But I also put the superhub 3 back to router mode and connceted only one device, my laptop by wire, last night and got only marignally better results.

I called up the engineer and he agreed it was a network issue and said he would contact the network team. He was a really nice guy and certainly did everything he could when he was here. I'll be giving him a great score on the opinion email.

But I really would like to know two things please. 

1. Is this an area issue that you'd regard as a matter of urgency? 

2. I'm not yet at this stage, but if I were to change ISP to another provider would they use the same line and therefore the problems would be the same? Or would there be a chance my problems would disappear?

Thankyou in advance.

[SuperslowDy]

Hi

Last week I was getting packet loss in games and high ping, and my work software was constantly crashing. The connection would drop at times as well. I'm working from home and our software relies on a good connection, any packet loss at all means I need to relogin to all the software and I lose anything I've been doing. I've had to use USB tethering but I don't have unlimited 4g so I'm reaching the point I'll not be able to do any work.

Called up Virgin 14/1/21 and an engineer came round 20/1/21. He removed our attenuator, tightened some stuff up etc.

Unfortunately It's getting far worse, not better.

I went to the trouble of using Pingplotter and PRTG's Ping Jitter sensor and the results show a huge issue. The jitter gets up to 36/37ms at times. I'd say I won't be playing any Rocket League or FIFA this weekend unless I want to constantly lose! :

https://imgur.com/h45m3ex

https://imgur.com/rbQL8sm

This is on a NIghthawk router today, wireless. But I also put the superhub 3 back to router mode and connceted only one device, my laptop by wire, last night and got only marignally better results.

I called up the engineer and he agreed it was a network issue and said he would contact the network team. He was a really nice guy and certainly did everything he could when he was here. I'll be giving him a great score on the opinion email.

But I really would like to know two things please. 

1. Is this an area issue that you'd regard as a matter of urgency? 

2. I'm not yet at this stage, but if I were to change ISP to another provider would they use the same line and therefore the problems would be the same? Or would there be a chance my problems would disappear?

Thankyou in advance.

[gary_dexter]

Virgin use their own cables.

Have you setup a BQM?

[tehwolf]

---

@SuperslowDy wrote:

1. Is this an area issue that you'd regard as a matter of urgency? 

2. I'm not yet at this stage, but if I were to change ISP to another provider would they use the same line and therefore the problems would be the same? Or would there be a chance my problems would disappear?

Thankyou in advance.

---

definitely worth setting up a BQM 

you can try calling 0800 561 0061 to get a check on issues in your postcode (i.e. more local than the online status checker at the top of this page)

And no - if you move to an openreach based provider, it is an entirely different infrastructure. 

[SuperslowDy]

I repsonded to you and then it said message didn't exist when I sent the reply.

But yes I always set up a BQM when I think the connection is a bit below par. That was what I showed to the engineer. Deleted that now as I've been using pingplotter mostly.

I shall set up a new one now and report back after a few hours or tomorrow been as I won't be up til 2am online gaming!

And thanks for that phone number. I'll give it a try.

[SuperslowDy]

Hello again.

So I did end up playing Rocket League because I was bored. Kept getting the packet loss warning on the the game but wasn't too bad. Then about 2am it went crackers.

Here is the BQM, ignore the thick red line at 10pm, the modem was off at that point. But after it you can see the regualr packet loss at the top. Then at 2am you can see the issue, this is where it showed me the jitter spiked to about 30ms on pingplotter which sent the ping crazy. The highest jitter I've ever had before this in my 15 or so years with Virgin has been 4ms.

https://imgur.com/a/atodNSH - BQM, check out around 2am

https://imgur.com/a/rugpVHy - pingplotter. easy to see what the issue was.

I'm a bit miffed Virgin haven't contacted me yet tbh after the engineer contacted them about the issue. I'm giving it til Monday, then I'm going elsewhere. As it's absolutely screwing up my work I just cannot afford to keep waiting for contact.

PS I called the 0800 number and it just beeped.

[gary_dexter]

There’s a small amount of latency yes. In comparison to other BQM‘s posted in here it’s minimal.

Post the network, upstream and downstream logs from the hubs admin pages back here as text. 

[SuperslowDy]

Latency I can live with, jitter should never go about 5ms though, anything above that is unacceptable. And packet loss should be 0%.

As I said, the packet loss is freezing my work software and has been since the week leading up to xmas day. I've had to use 4g off my phomne because I cannot work otherwise. I feel like you're downplaying what is a serious network issue. Never had packet loss or high jitter in 15 years and now I'm having it and can't even work, it's not a big issue?! BQM is fairly useless due to the lack of detail, pingplotter and PRTG show the issues. You guys should be telling people to use pingplotter, not BQM.

I'm still confused as to why you don't think packet loss and huge jitter is not an issue? If you only talk about latency on here, I've come to the wrong place.

Downstream bonded channels

Channel Frequency (Hz) Power (dBmV) SNR (dB) Modulation Channel ID

1	187000000	9.1	40	256 qam	7
2	139000000	9.3	40	256 qam	1
3	147000000	9	40	256 qam	2
4	155000000	8.6	40	256 qam	3
5	163000000	8.8	40	256 qam	4
6	171000000	9	40	256 qam	5
7	179000000	9	40	256 qam	6
8	195000000	9	40	256 qam	8
9	203000000	9	40	256 qam	9
10	211000000	9	40	256 qam	10
11	219000000	9	40	256 qam	11
12	227000000	9	40	256 qam	12
13	235000000	9	40	256 qam	13
14	243000000	8.9	40	256 qam	14
15	251000000	9	40	256 qam	15
16	259000000	9.4	40	256 qam	16
17	267000000	9.4	40	256 qam	17
18	275000000	9	40	256 qam	18
19	283000000	8.8	40	256 qam	19
20	291000000	9	40	256 qam	20
21	299000000	9	40	256 qam	21
22	307000000	9	40	256 qam	22
23	315000000	9	40	256 qam	23
24	323000000	8.9	40	256 qam	24

Downstream bonded channels

Channel Locked Status RxMER (dB) Pre RS Errors Post RS Errors

1	Locked	40.3	303	5084
2	Locked	40.3	346	6065
3	Locked	40.3	319	6229
4	Locked	40.3	336	5730
5	Locked	40.9	330	5693
6	Locked	40.3	356	5485
7	Locked	40.3	325	5331
8	Locked	40.3	328	5604
9	Locked	40.3	468	5600
10	Locked	40.9	399	6225
11	Locked	40.3	392	6423
12	Locked	40.3	436	6172
13	Locked	40.3	503	5621
14	Locked	40.3	464	5923
15	Locked	40.3	497	6055
16	Locked	40.3	468	6700
17	Locked	40.3	462	6810
18	Locked	40.9	403	6544
19	Locked	40.9	384	6171
20	Locked	40.3	364	5576
21	Locked	40.3	403	5620
22	Locked	40.9	343	5373
23	Locked	40.3	382	5789
24	Locked	40.3	355	5166

[tehwolf]

There is some packet loss, but it looks minimal - not saying it’s not relevant or something that you should ignore, but the bqm otherwise is pretty stable with very little variance.

I’ve never seen jitter of sub 5ms on my own vm connection... accepted the fact that docsis is an inherently more latent and variable technology than xDSL years ago.. my own jitter tends to hover around the 7-8ms mark, and is acceptable for all of my use cases including gaming, voip, video etc. 

I also get a bit of packet loss here and there according to my own bqm, impact on the applications I use is minimal but it is something I’d like to see fixed too- I feel like there’s some noise on my line somwhere but my expertise doesn’t stretch into the docsis portion of the network so I’m just guessing 😉

As for why bqm.. not everyone on these forums understands this stuff at any level of detail, bqm is a blunt tool but it’s relatively easy to set up and it will monitor over a continuous period..