Internet connection keeps dropping every 30 minutes

[redorbluepill]

Hi Virgin Media Community,

I experience a very weird problem with my connection. It keeps on dropping out every 30 minutes, exactly on the dot. Which most of the time causes me to loose the virtual desktop for work.

I have a long journey of root cause analysis behind me and finally decided to do a longer term speedtest with speedtest-cli and auto-speedtest, running every 5 minutes on my Raspberry Pi (static IP address) connected via network cable to the Virgin Media router. This resulted in the following 

Strangly enough, for every full hour and half hour, my connection drops. I did run it every minute the day before and it confirmed it's excactly at these times.
Please note that the additional drop at shortly after 9am is the result of rebooting the VM router. However, the connection still dropped out at 9.30am, 10am, and 10.30am.

I confirmed this assessment with another of my Debian machines at home. It also looses the connection.
To further exclude any dodgy ethernet cables, I also connected another MacOS machine via WiFi to the VM router and ran the speedtest. Same result: drop outs every half hour. I have to admit though that this will need to contact the DHCP and DNS server connected via ethernet cable (and ethernet switch in-between) to the VM router.

I just have no idea what could cause this. I reckon I need a Virgin Media engineer to re-test the connection?

My set up:
I have a Virgin Media router, which functions as Wifi-Hotspot and router. Combined with a Raspberry Pi, which runs PiHole with DHCP server and unbound DNS service. Most of my machine are connected via ethernet cable, but some machines connect via WiFi.

What I have tried so far:
- Double checked my connection with ping 8.8.8.8 to ensure there is a problem with the connection and not the DNS
- Checked my cron jobs on my Raspberry Pi to make sure there are no big services running every 30 minutes. That doesn't seem to be the case
- Restarted my Raspberry Pi
- Checked my DHCP settings and the leases to my machines and the leases are for a week.
- Restarted the VM router and moved the power supply to a seperate power point (no other devices on this power point)
- I have a BQM from Thikbroadband running: Broadband Quality Monitor from Thinkbroadband 
- And now I do have a speedtest running every 5 minutes on my Raspberry Pi and my seperate Debian machine.

What I haven't done yet is:
- Set up my MacOS device with a static IP address and 8.8.8.8 as DNS server and perform testing

Does anyone have any additional ideas?

Many thanks in advance!

[Sofia_B]

Thanks for getting back to us @redorbluepill.

I've just checked this for you, I can see the estimated fix time for the issue has been moved to the 16th of December. 

I appreciate how frustrating this must be and we apologise for any inconvenience caused. 

If you'd like to me escalate this to a formal complaint, please let me know and I'll pop you a PM. 

Thanks, 

[redorbluepill]

Hi Sofia,

many thanks for the update.

Yeah, would be great if we could start a formal complaint. Not that I don't trust that it will be resolved at one point in the future (the technicians have always been pretty good and friendly), but it just drags on for too long.

Best

[John_GS]

Hi @redorbluepill

Thanks for coming back to us. I will be honest, there's nothing a complaint will do, as it's an outage we're aware of and working on fixing.

I'll send you a PM though now.

Best

[redorbluepill]

Thanks John,

well, I think the problem becomes: is there really an outage that can be resolved. This is now going on for months.
I did a lot on my end trying to fix it, from connecting my devices via ethernet cables were possible to installing PowerLine connectors.
Last time a technician was here, the Hub was exchanged.
However, the problem remains and every half hour I'm getting disconnected from the Virgin Media network.
At one point, I just need to draw a line and move on. And I hope a formal complaint will help me to exit the contract early if not resolved within a reasonable timeframe.

Best

[Ayisha_B]

Hi @redorbluepill,

I can appreciate this is not ideal and I can assure you our  engineers are working hard to get this resolved for all those impacted in the area.

Did you respond to my colleagues PM regarding getting a complaint raised for you?

If not, please refer to our complaints code of practice which outlines the complaints process in full.

[redorbluepill]

Well, apparently the technicians worked on this yesterday. We lost connection for quite some while and it was communicated that it would be resolved by 6pm yesterday.

Safe to say that the problem still persists. I'm still being disconnected every half an hour.

Even though I don't like to leave, I think I'd prefer to start the process of ending my contract early.

[Paul_DN]

Hi redorbluepill ,

Thank you for reaching back out to us, the area's issue has been resolved now, how are things now, did you manage to raise a complaint?

Regards

Paul.

[redorbluepill]

Hi Paul,

unfortunately this didn't fix anything. I'm still being disconnected every half an hour.
Please see the speed tests for the last 2 days below. You can still see a break in connection at every hour and half hour.

 

 Any chance to get a technician out to resolve this for good?
At first, your team should maybe check the connection from your end at the full hour or at half past (usually on the dot)? You'll find that you won't be able to reach my Virgin Router.
In the end we're still connected to the cable from our neighbours. So maybe connecting us properly to the Virgin Media network would help?

Best

[Molly_T]

Hi @redorbluepill thank you for getting back to us. Sorry to hear you are still experiencing issues! 

I have had a look on our systems, and the most recent disconnections that are showing are from 14th December. There are none picking up after this date. I can also see the uptime on the hub is showing at 12 days. 

I have run a set of tests on the hour as you requested and no disconnections or issues are showing. (Run at 11am on 02.01.21)

I do appreciate your concern regarding your connection coming from the neighbours, I have got in touch with the area field team to see if they can provide any further insight on this. I will get back to you when i have had a response to see if we can get someone booked in for you. 

All the best, 

[redorbluepill]

Hi Molly,

many thanks for your reply and the extra tests.

Very interesting you can't see anything in the logs.
As a result I have reset my VM router to factory settings, deactivated WiFi and only connected one Linux machine per ethernet cable. I ran connection tests every minute and interestingly enough the problem still persists. Every half-hour I'm getting disconnected. When I ran these tests from 4.36pm to 5.39pm today, my Linux machine couldn't connect to the internet at exactly 5pm and 5.30pm. So from my side it looks like the problem is definitely with VM.

The length of the disconnects seem to be between 5-30 seconds, so maybe that's too short to trigger any log entries on your side. While not a big problem when watching movies due to normal buffering (sometimes low quality for a bit), it is unfortunately very annoying when you work from home and get disconnected from a call or from the virtual work machine.

Maybe you guys should send a technician out who performs a proper root cause analysis?

Looking forward to hear back from the area field team though.

All the best.