Virgin Media Community

[Pfb201]

Well this might have temporarily fixed it but as I said it's not something I believe I should have to do every week. This is something which had only started happening recently and is certainly to do with the performance of the control plane and therefore DHCP.

Please stop advising whether reboots provide any permanent fix and request they look into this. Most people on this forum are more than capable of turning it off and on again and are even resorting to using modem mode with separate routers; that's how bad your Intel puma chip is in Superhub 3.

[Katie_WT]

Glad that the reboot helped for the moment.

If you have any further issues with it, do pop back and let us know and we can go into more checks with you if needed @Pfb201

We will always ask if a reboot has been performed as many customers don't actually think to do this as the first check so we are sorry if you had already attempted this when we asked. 

Cheers

[Pfb201]

Hey Katie,

I know this isn't going to be a permanent fix based on the information already prevalent in this forum and known issues with the puma6 chipset with spectre/meltdown mitigations put in place.

What I think we need to know is when are Virgin doing a patch to remediate this permanently. The reboot hasn't solved the problem it's merely refreshed the processes and potentially cleared out other services which will eventually restart again.

Because there is no escalation points either through email or phone the forum is the only place to kick up a fuss about technical users valid points being overlooked with first line responses being issued.

Can we get a proper answer as to a deterministic fix rather than one which provides no ongoing solution to the issue?

[bidmead]

Katie, I'm very much with Pfb201 on this.

It's no good waltzing around this issue. It's not a matter of "more checks if needed". The absolutely huge latency of the UI is a well-defined, widely recognised non-trivial problem that clearly deserves better attention than it's currently getting.

So I ask again, do we have an ETA for a firmware fix? If there's no possibility of a firmware fix, when does VM propose to update our hardware?

-- 

Chris

[Andruser]

Given that the DHCP menu hang seemed to come about only when the Puma 6 latency flaw got fixed, I wonder if that is the price we have to pay for that fix, and the poor UI performance was regarded as an acceptable form of collateral damage? It would be very surprising if there were no consequences of shunting the processing load between the Hub 3's various chips.  

If that is the case, then I suspect most of us would prefer to have the current latency performance of the Hub 3 and tolerate the poor UI performance.  In an ideal world the Hub 3 would never have been an Intel-based product (and in the same ideal world the new Hub 4 would not either, and would have had self contained speed testing, and automated "phone home" for out of spec diagnostics, it being 2019 and all that....).  But I think we have to accept that all ISP hubs are minimum-acceptable-spec, cost-engineered mediocrity, and the ETA of this bug being fixed is probably twelfth of Never. Digressing further, I think that with the Hub 3, VM walked into the trap, albeit they ignored the warnings from their own user testing in preference to telling Arris to take a hike.  But the mediocrity of the Hub 4 shows that the company learned nothing from the Hub 3 experience.  Virgin Media's procurement people are evidently like cynics the world over, and know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

[Pfb201]

Completely agree with this statement and I'm well versed in cost engineering and decisions that have gone into this process. Because the majority of user base don't touch the UI, don't know what DHCP is and just call it the "box" I think that the technical audience being ignored is probably a symptom of the fact that just getting people to buy into a new service with a new hub is much easier.

That being said puma7 shows little signs of being anything more than minor iterative improvement especially since testing was probably done pre spectre mitigation and even then what other choice to they have in the docsis termination market being in mind the vast majority of the UK uses Xdsl technology or FTTP which is a completely different market.

Still don't think we should be answering these questions ourselves because it just propagates the message that power users control their own destiny rather than the SP actually acknowledging issues and having good technical messaging and customer stakeholder management.

[strafft]

"good technical messaging and customer stakeholder management." = exactly... I had a similar discussion a while back - no proper incident Management, let alone Problem Management. Sadly I think "they" are all the same.... 

[draki]

Just adding my voice to this.. A couple of days ago it took a couple of minutes to load. I've been trying today  - _after_ a reboot - and it took about 10 mins to load.

[bidmead]

Yes, it's virtually unusable.

But I think we're running out of ideas about how to get Virgin Media to take any interest in this issue.

-- 

Chris

[Paul_DN]

Hi bidmead,

Thank you for coming back to us in our community, I am sorry a permanent fix is taking a while.

We are working on this however we haven't had any updates at the moment.

Regards

Paul.