Virgin Media Community

[thatprogrammer]

Hello,

For as long as I can remember I've had issues with Virgin Media, but they've had me locked into contracts for the longest time and no one else can provide the advertised speeds they do in my area.

Over the past 2 months, my internet has been becoming worse and worse, with increased latency climbing up and causing me unable to be in calls, browse the internet, download anything or do basic tasks which require an internet connection. As of recent, it seems to have got so bad that WifiCall is impossible, our landline is crackling and trying to download anything brings my connection to a full stop. 

I paid for PingPlotter Sidekick as I had been using it to track my latency issues following a recommendation from a sysadmin friend, and when I started using sidekick a few days ago, it basically told me there was a bandwidth saturation on the Providers Network (third hop), as well as Bandwidth Saturation (ISP), also the third hop. 

I've got a tech coming out this coming Monday (29th August), which marks the 1000th visit to my property probably. As the lack tech who came here basically told me in no uncertain words that the issue was likely that my local hub box where my coax goes too from my property was jam-packed and likely was causing the low-speed issues, but I just want someone to come to basically look at it and go 'Yeah, that's it' and get it elevated to be resolved because I simply can not work with this latency and speed. 

[Matthew_ML]

Hey thatprogrammer, thank you for reaching out and warm welcome to the community, I am so sorry to hear about your connection issues.

I have taken a look and I can see that a tech has been booked in.

Please can you do me favour and report back to me with an update after this visit please. Thanks 

[thatprogrammer]

Hello there,

Yes, I booked a tech at the earliest time possible. I'm unsure how much difference the visit will make but I'm willing to give it a go.

Obviously, this isn't my first time having a tech and I've had a bad experience with nothing ever being fixed after a visit.

I'll report back once I have a report of what the verdict was this time. 

[jbrennand]

Whilst waiting - we on here are more used to interpreting BQM's - VM use them too - can you set one up. It will also show/reveal whether VM have too many connected users at your location too.  Good grist for the mill 🙂
___________________________________________________________________

If you haven’t already, set up a free, secure and “offlsite” - “Broadband Quality Monitor” to continually monitor the state of your connection and record any true network dropouts , latency issues, packet drops, etc - it will thus allow you to differentiate between those and simple wifi dropouts. It does it 24/7/365 and it keeps a visual record of any/all of your network disconnections, useful data to have to match to the Network logs (in your Hub settings) and also in discussions with VM - note it will take a few hours to start seeing a sensible picture - post up the “link” to the “share live graph”. Click the lower link (Share Live Graph) then click generate. Copy the text in the Direct Link box, beware, there may be more text than you can see. On here click the Link icon (2 links chain to the left of the camera icon) In the URL box paste the link you copied and then click OK

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality

[thatprogrammer]

Hello!

I followed your instructions but it doesn't appear to be generating any data. I'm slightly confused how this website is designed to work.

You mentioned it's free, so I assumed it maybe needed some software to be installed on my computer or another device, but I can't seem to find that data anywhere. 

Here is the stats page: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/fab64f8261c1ae1886000840e6901c259d..., but I'm unsure what to get from a blank graph. 

I looked into it more and it mentions I need this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/FireBrick-FB2900-Router-Firewall-loaded/dp/B07H6PK2DX (which is not something I'm willing to pay for just to prove the problem exists)

[jbrennand]

Nope it just runs on the TB server. It pings the router every second or so and stores all the response data

You are seeing a wall of Red. (no data/connection)

That usually means the ip address in the BQM settings doesnt match that you see when you find it from the PC. Check that first.

Or... your router is set not to respond to pings - or cant do it (eg Google nest ) - Do you have your own router or are you using the Hubs router ?

Go into its settings and Navigate to routers web interface

Look somewhere like.... (path may differ between routers)

• Advanced Settings > Advanced > Ping > Respond to ICMP echo requests sent to WAN IP

And make sure that is ticked to allow the responses

[thatprogrammer]

Hello there! I previously had my Hub 4 configured in modem mode but I switched it to use Router Mode to see if I could find the setting. I did disable the firewall and it didn't seem to work at first but it seems my IP had changed, after pinging that IP externally using one of my external servers, I was able to get a ping response back. 

The issue here is that although I can now get an external ping to the new IP I've been provided, due to the restrictiveness of Virgin Media's Hub 4, I am unable to change the '192.168' part of the IP, so it would clash with my Unifi Gear's primary subnet. 

Before I re-enabled modem mode, I took some pictures of the stats on my laptop of realspeed to see what it reported while modem mode was disabled. You can see those below.

Test 1;



Test 2;




My Hub 4 is now back in modem mode and is no-longer responding to pings, which could be due to a setting on my Dream Machine Pro. 

Any other notes? Sorry it took me so long, uploads are really slow on my LTE Network. 

[thatprogrammer]

It seems to have randomly started working fine again. Not sure why...

I'm going to monitor it until midnight Friday and then cancel the tech visit if it stays working as it should. 

[jbrennand]

Modem mode and router mode have two different ip addresses. Do a BQM for each 🙂

[thatprogrammer]

Router Mode responds to pings, Modem Mode does not. This could be Unifi dropping external pings though.