High ping spikes making gaming impossible

[R-T-G]

We've been getting spikes for a few months now but in the past couple of weeks they've gotten a lot worse with frequent request timeouts that are making gaming impossible. I set up a monitor here a couple weeks ago to track what's happening

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/94973f453674d938cea05bc9b09a2f4395...

There was some work done in our area yesterday but sadly it hasn't resolved anything.

Very concerened this might be due to over subscription but hoping someone might be able to help.

[Paulina_Z]

Hi @R-T-G,

Thank you for coming back to us about your ongoing connection and latency issues. I can completely understand how frustrating this must be for you. 

I can see that you were speaking to my colleague further in regards to this issue. Please get back in touch with them so we can investigate your signal issues further and see what we can do to help further as you're clearly still impacted by this issue.

Keep us updated if you can.

Thank you.

[brummyuk]

Don't waste your time mate, get off of them as soon as you can. They will keep sending engineers out, keep telling you there is no issue on their end which is total BS. Virgin Media have not spent the money maintaining their network and it's buckling under the stress. In the last 3 weeks they have been having blackouts throughout the UK so much so that it made the news. You won't ever get it resolved. They are the worst ISP in the UK and they'll soon lose all their customers to BT or other providers because fibre cables are going down everywhere. Virgin have been too complacent because they were the only ones offering the speeds but it is the most unstable internet you will ever use. Unfit for gaming. Don't waste your time trying to fix the issue, two years I've suffered with these issues. Replaced hubs, wiring inside the house. They even had the nerve to try and say it was something on my end like my computer. Virgin are clowns. Get out asap.

[ThisIsMy3rdAcc]

I wholeheartedly agree with brummyuk, they have known about issues with equipment and network for years and have denied their hub was to blame for majority of my issues, after writing to the CEO on multiple occasions explaining the issue in detail and how I managed to.prove the hub was the problem, I got nowhere for over a year because 'only select customers' were allowed to get the newer hub that was more stable.

In the end I bit the bullet and paid BT to install a phone line and went with a FTTC provider on a whopping 30mb line, which has had 0 outages since being in and no noticeable packet loss, I still have the VM line and they've now sent me a hub 5 which has drastically improved (but not completely solved) the issues. I've also invested in a good router, put the hub into modem mode and have it set to fail over, when pings fail on the VM line the router automatically fails over to my other broadband provider and I only see an outage of a few seconds.

This is a massive overkill just to get a reliable connection, but with WFH and gaming it means I fail back to the FTTC and I can get on with work without losing time, money, holiday or credibility at work.

As soon as FTTP is rolled out (end of this year) I'm leaving VM and won't look back.

Do yourself a favour and jump ship ASAP.

[R-T-G]

Hi @brummyuk and @ThisIsMy3rdAcc some great suggestions there thanks. Nothing's really changed since starting this thread, other than our sense of resignation! The engineer did visit ages ago but not much he could do. It's over subscription, spikes are just awful every evening & weekends. Off peak we get around 20ms which is brilliant but who games at 3am when you need to be in work for 8!

Engineer did mention getting us the new Hub5 which he thought might help and we were desperate/excited to try it but nothing happened so heyho.

Anyway we also bit a bullet on Monday & signed up for trial with Three's 5g Hub. So far Ping is higher - 70ms & 100ms ingame, so still latency but no spikes meaning gaming's a whole lot smoother without the disconnects.

We're locked into Virgin for another 12 months so we might give a router a go. Would you share which one you got?

[ThisIsMy3rdAcc]

Hi R-T-G

The router I have is an Asus RT-AX89X, it's quite expensive and very overkill for what most people need, it's worth mentioning though that the issue still persisted for me (albeit somewhat better) until they sent me a hub5.

The best course of action you could take at this stage is to email the CEO of VM and escalate the complaint, once you've hit a dead end with that (you no doubt will) request they let you exit the contract with no fees, failing that escalate the complaint to Ofcom, you're paying for a service you're unable to use, VM advertise 'gaming' as one of the things you can do on their packages. If you cant game on it because of the issues you face, they could be mis-selling your service as they tout their 500 (and above) packages are "good for gaming" which in your case appears to be inaccurate.