Thanks for the info, Gexton. Nice to know I'm not alone. I'll mention the fault code if I manage to get through on the phone.
I've spent several hours in queues over the last week. Understandably, Virgin Media announced they're closing some call centres this week, and yesterday I was cut off after 40 minutes without reaching first line support. So, I'm not holding out much hope for an improvement in the coming weeks, unless one of the helpful Virgin engineers on here wants to suggest something.
> Where about in Beckenham are, Park Langley way by any chance?
I'm not too far away: Bramerton Road. I wonder how much infrastructure we share.
The odd thing is, according to speed tests, the throughput is reasonable. I'm supposed to be on 200 Mbps and the Google Wifi speed check usually shows me at 215 DS / 19 US, presumably measured in the early hours). Yesterday afternoon the latency was spiking as usual, but I was still reading 116 DS / 15 US. I've always assumed that the ISPs may game the speed tests a little, maybe by tweaking the packet scheduling to known speed test destinations, but those kind of numbers would be more than adequate for what I do.
I've been assuming that I would see a significant degradation in both bandwidth and latency if the infra was saturated. I should have paid more attention in my networking classes. This felt like packets being dropped due to bad hardware. Maybe the traffic load is similarly spiky...?
BTW / FYI - In the end I switched to tethering via an Android phone over 4G Vodafone, which I'd expect to have substantially lower bandwidth, and had relative high ping times (~60-80ms) but it was consistent and never went above 100ms. I managed to have perfectly tolerable VCs and remote computer access for a few hours. I'm told that a regular SIM will get throttled when tethering, but data-only SIMs that come with 4G modems won't. Obviously, at this point a lot of networks have sold out of 4G modems. I need to do some research into my work plan to see if I'm they're to get a monster bill or if I'll get throttled. If this continues and I'm able to, I'll be switching to a mobile network for work when it gets bad.
This is what I'm getting on a Saturday evening. Anything from 15 to 752ms! No way I could do anything even vaguely latency sensitive with that.
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=154ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=227ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=248ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=752ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=368ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.210.196: bytes=32 time=29ms TTL=54