Virgin Media Community

[dl12345]

Summary: my connection has extreme jitter

IP address 62.252.212.113 is the second hop on my internet connection

traceroute to 194.168.8.100 (194.168.8.100), 30 hops max, 46 byte packets
1 10.53.38.121 10.345 ms 21.744 ms 12.926 ms
2 62.252.212.113 12.944 ms 32.282 ms 17.689 ms
3 194.168.8.100 11.037 ms !C 15.956 ms !C 9.862 ms !C

The following output is produced by the command

while true; do
        ping -c 100 62.252.212.113 | grep "^rtt"
done

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 7.742/46.819/328.362/53.990 ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 10.376/77.193/368.880/61.984 ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 15.984/78.336/500.713/84.558 ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 17.895/85.592/527.684/79.570 ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 13.865/89.434/391.420/74.703 ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 11.185/67.925/287.308/63.875 ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 7.890/48.388/441.831/60.534 ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 7.217/45.319/798.977/88.825 ms

This command is run directly on my router which is connected directly to the HUB 4.0 with a cat6 cable

Each line represents the stats for 100 pings to my second hop and this is therefore the averages for a total of 800 pings

The jitter is extreme. In some cases roundtrip time approaches 800ms, which is enough to go to Hong Kong and back four times

Latency to the second hop on my internet connection should NOT be so high

My modem log shows no errors and all power levels are within spec. The modem has been restarted by VM support several times already

My router is NOT the cause. I have a second internet link connected to the same router and roundtrip times out of this link to any ip address are constant with minimal jitter, and in the UK, below 10ms

I have spent about one hour on the phone today to VM support. Even the second level support staff are clueless, just offering to reset my modem and then telling me that "since the speed is ok your internet link is fine; it has no problems".

Nonsense. They don't even seem to comprehend the concept of latency and the evidence above indicates there is clearly a problem.

Are there any competent VM support staff accessible via this forum who a.) can comprehend the problem and b.) can assist in diagnosing the cause?

[jbrennand]

Its not a hotline to VM - its a forum where a community of users offer help and guidance.

A VM person should come along eventually but it can be up to a week or so to get here and for these issues a non-VM forum user will probably be the better technically qualified - but that's not me 🙂

[dl12345]

Finally, on the 5th time I managed to talk to someone in 2nd level support, who even though she didn't comprehend the problem fully, was actually willing to listen and then repeat exactly what I told her to someone in engineering rather than just telling me there is no problem.

She told me they checked the CMTS and they've found that the CMTS I'm connected to is totally maxed out (although she was fuzzy about what part of it was maxed out).

They weren't aware of this prior to my call, which in itself is surprising - one would expect that their diagnostic tools would raise an alert if this were the case!

So they've now raised a ticket to fix it and quoted roughly a week to fix. 

[jbrennand]

That doesn't bode well. Particularly if it means "overutilisation" - those issues sometimes drag on for months or even years.

If you are suffering from that it will be very evident on a BQM - set one up...

______________

If you haven’t already, set up a free and secure “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” (as per instructions on the TB website) when it starts to develop.

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

[dl12345]

I have something very much like BQM already setup and running on my VM in a data centre, as well as much more sophisticated tools than that.

The problem was totally obvious to me already - it was just getting VM to listen that was difficult

[dl12345]

I suspect she meant "overutilization" and your take on that (months to fix) fills me with trepidation

[jbrennand]

Even if you have something more sophisticated - VM will take the BQM as acceptable data - and perhaps not yours.

It's not easy to get VM to say that you have an OU issue - and to be fair - other "faults" can give a similar pattern - but when they do it can be a real problem and yiou are right to be trepidatious 😞

For a detailed critique of OU issues see the excellent comments by Andruser in message 4 of this recent thread which also shows a typical OU BQM

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Networking-and-WiFi/Jitter-and-latency/m-p/4609932#M378967

[Chris_W1]

Hi dl12345, thanks for the message we have checked things locally and in the area and is showing no issues, everything is showing as green. Please monitor the connection for us and let us know if anything changes? Chris

[Chris_W1]

Hi dl12345, after further investigation, we can see that you are being affected by the following fault F008889341 and the estimated fix time for this is the 24th March. This is for congestion in the area and can take some time to fix issues such as these. Please bear with us - Chris

[dl12345]

Thanks, yes - it was I who reported this fault on Friday.

It took some effort before the support staff even understood the problem and escalated it, after which someone recognised that there is a capacity problem. I'm not encouraged by seeing how resolution of capacity issues has dragged on for other areas.

Virgin Media is over-selling. The engineers and sales people need to do better capacity planning together so that customers don't end up paying big money for an internet connection which is simultaneously way more expensive (£77 vs £20 in my case vs my backup connection) and vastly inferior in quality too. 

Right now, my expensive 1gig connection is good only for bulk download. No interactive or latency sensitive traffic at all