Systemic problem in my street / the Aylesford neighbourhood

[mlgibbons]

Hi

Let me start by saying that I've been with Virgin cable for over 15 years and have generally been extremely happy with them but currently I think there seems to be a systemic problem in my street and possibly wider.

My son noticed that in the last few weeks his CoD sessions were becoming erratic with long ping times. Before then everything was fine. Coincidence that Virgin recently upgraded our network? Who knows. Anyway I settled down to do some investigations. What I found was not good at all.

1. Firstly I saw massive swings in ping times (10ms to 1700ms) and some packet loss not only to sites like 1.1.1.1 but also to intermediate routers in the path including the first hop.
2. This problem not only seems to affect me but many of my neighbours who were oblivious to the issues up until now
3. The issue seems to manifest from the first router upstream from each house's cable connection

I setup numerous BQM monitors for me and my neighbours and they are appalling.

Interestingly I also setup a monitor for a client id which is one higher than my immediate neighbour and that looks great.

This leads me to think that there is a systemic problem in my local area and my primary suspect is at the fibre or cabinet level.

Virgin have so far tried to help by upgrading my connection to 1G and sending me a new V4 hub.

Before they did this they tried to connect to my hub and couldn't. Something which they said they had never seen before.

Sadly this has not improved things. In fact it has made them worse. Now BQM cannot even get a response from my external IP address.

You can see the situation in the images below which show the good connection, one of my neighbours and my connection - note the almost 100% dropped packets after moving up to the V4 hub today.

I have a call with Virgin scheduled for Tuesday to investigate further.

Interested in any thoughts others might have regarding these symptoms.

Good person's connectionMy neighbour'sMine

[Adduxi]

Looks like over subscribed area. Of course it could be local area fault? 

[mlgibbons]

Yep. I'll talk to them on Tuesday.

Weird that the bqm goes to 100% packet loss on multiple houses after a period. The hostname and IP do not appear to have changed and if I ping them myself all is good.

For now I've setup my bqm with my dyndns hostname so we'll see how that is.

Live link below

Quite honestly I'm considering getting an idnet ADSL line installed just for my son's gaming latency. Terrible bandwidth but I've read good things about latency.

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/5ad15e037bec29899d233be77b7eda6034... 

[Adduxi]

I use both VM and BT VDSL, using a Dual WAN router, for redundancy and route my Xboxes via the BT circuit. I also get the bonus of IPv6 and no faffing with port forwarding. Yes the speed is less, but the latency is better.

[Alex_RM]

Hi mlgibbons,

Thanks for posting and welcome to our community 🙂

I'm sorry to see you've been having some issues with your connection. I've been able to locate your account using your forum details and can see a few of the hubs levels are out of specification. 

This is something I'll need to arrange a technician for, before I can do this I've popped you over a private message to get a few more details from you (purple envelope, top right hand corner)

Alex_Rm

[Alex_RM]

Thanks for popping your details over via private message mlgibbons 🙂

I've arranged an engineer visit for you, you can view the time and date of the appointment via your online account here

Alex_Rm

[mlgibbons]

Hi. Thanks. I see nothing in my account about a visit but I do keep on getting the text messages. I may not be in tomorrow PM until 2pm so can you move the visit to tomorrow morning, sometime after 4pm, the weekend or Monday morning? Thanks.

[mlgibbons]

I note the comments on this page which resonate with my experience since the "upgrade" of the network

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/9127-virgin-media-says-it-has-switched-on-docsis-3-1-everywhere

[mlgibbons]

And now I can't even ping my router.

[Travis_M]

Hi @mlgibbens

Keep us updated with how your tech visit goes, my apologies for the inconvenience.

Regards