My 350Mb connection is throttled to 10Mb

[ProTofik]

Hi,

I have been Virgin Media (and NTL) customer for the past 12 years. Starting with 2Mb/s connection, I went through multiple upgrades, currently at 350Mb/s.

In the past weeks or maybe months, I have noticed that as soon as I turn torrenting on any computer or server in my house on, the WAN download connection drops to 10Mb/s flat on every device in the house (total). On top of that, I experience massive, 25% packet drops (tested by ping -t 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8). Turn torrent off, and bam, problem solved.

My SuperHub 3 is setup in modem mode. My edge firewall is virtualized pfSense 2.4.4 and VLAN routing is done on Cisco 3560CX. Pretty basic setup that works fine.

Has Virgin Media introduced some sort of policy recently that throttles customer's connection down to make it feel like 2007 again for torrenting, or is my SuperHub 3 modem acting up?

Paying over £50 for 10Mb connection does not seem like a good deal for me any more. There are unthrottled 70/20 options out there for half the price.

[jamxuk]

I had something similar to this with my unifi USG. I inadvertently enabled QoS (what it calls Smart routes) and my speed dropped off a cliff. Long story short, it can’t use hardware optimisation and instead uses the cpu meaning really poor performance. I’m on M500 and with QoS on, I only get ~150/200Mbps. With QoS off I get >500Mbps. 

Looking at this post, and assuming most people using modem mode have fairly decent equipment, it’s worth checking and seeing if your got QoS running somewhere. It’s possible QoS is throttling when running torrents, or, due to the high loan when torrenting, QoS can’t keep up and your connection becomes CPU bound. Worth a look. 

[ProTofik]

This is not the issue. Connect your PC directly to your superhub in modem mode and it also throttles itself.

[jamxuk]

I did and had no issue, was getting > 500. 

[atissue]

Replication steps:

Power on superhub3, load up normal amount of connections (few hundred easy when browsing the web?), continue for 12/24+ hours, don't forget we all leave our modems on and have months of uptime. 

Load up torrent/internet download with many threads(200+?) 

Try and do a speedtest/single thread download. Repeat. Watch the performance. 

SH3 is fairly sneaky in the fact that it doesn't occur instantly, which is why engineer visits and everyone quickly trying to replicate useless as the first thing any engineer does (including me) is turn the damn thing off and on again and call it fixed. This needs to go the embedded devs or tier3 networking support - there's a clear firmware problem or provisioning bias in modem mode. 

[rwills32]

A very interesting thread and something I've experienced yesterday.

So unfortunately I am not on the 300mb service but the 100mb service with Virgin Media and have been a customer of theirs for the last 4 years.  I run my SH3 in modem mode as quite frankly their wifi singal and firmware is an absolute joke.  The SH3 in modem mode is connected to a DrayTek 2920 via the gigabit wan port and i've always maintained a healthy 110+mb/s service with them until recently where I downloaded a few torrents (nothing illegal) and noticed massive latency issues, speed test was showing the test as massively fluctuating and saying I was only getting about 52% stability with a poor 20-30mb service, however upload speed hadn't changed.

For someone who works in this industry daily with routers and uk isp's I was confident that my router and wired wifi ap's around the house were not the problem, but for the sake of VM trying it on I double checked nothing had changed, pushed all save configurations back to the router and ap's to ensure that I wasn't compromised and someone decided to play, all behold nothing changed.

I phoned VM and the automated system detected a fault, told me to wait 10 minutes reboot my equipment and if it doesn't work right after to phone back. Again this didn't fix the problem so I phoned them back.  They picked up on I was using an external router setup and asked me to unplug it etc, then wanted me to pin push the reset button and although I could reach the hole I told them I couldn't forcing them to reset it from their side. They did a firmware update and it rebooted, then they told me to power it off and back on once again and it worked. I've put the SH3 back into mode mode and reattached it to my draytek and it's working fine.  The only thing that's changed is the dhcp assigned ip from VM has changed where as I could hold the same IP for months upon end.

This could very well be traffic shaping or monitoring from VM despite them saying they do not do that anymore, a dhcp ip assignment issue or a firmware problem on the SH3, either way it's fixed for me now and hope you get it sorted soon.

[-tony-]

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@rwills32 wrote:

A very interesting thread and something I've experienced yesterday.

So unfortunately I am not on the 300mb service but the 100mb service with Virgin Media and have been a customer of theirs for the last 4 years.  I run my SH3 in modem mode as quite frankly their wifi singal and firmware is an absolute joke.  The SH3 in modem mode is connected to a DrayTek 2920 via the gigabit wan port and i've always maintained a healthy 110+mb/s service with them until recently where I downloaded a few torrents (nothing illegal) and noticed massive latency issues, speed test was showing the test as massively fluctuating and saying I was only getting about 52% stability with a poor 20-30mb service, however upload speed hadn't changed.

For someone who works in this industry daily with routers and uk isp's I was confident that my router and wired wifi ap's around the house were not the problem, but for the sake of VM trying it on I double checked nothing had changed, pushed all save configurations back to the router and ap's to ensure that I wasn't compromised and someone decided to play, all behold nothing changed.

I phoned VM and the automated system detected a fault, told me to wait 10 minutes reboot my equipment and if it doesn't work right after to phone back. Again this didn't fix the problem so I phoned them back.  They picked up on I was using an external router setup and asked me to unplug it etc, then wanted me to pin push the reset button and although I could reach the hole I told them I couldn't forcing them to reset it from their side. They did a firmware update and it rebooted, then they told me to power it off and back on once again and it worked. I've put the SH3 back into mode mode and reattached it to my draytek and it's working fine.  The only thing that's changed is the dhcp assigned ip from VM has changed where as I could hold the same IP for months upon end.

This could very well be traffic shaping or monitoring from VM despite them saying they do not do that anymore, a dhcp ip assignment issue or a firmware problem on the SH3, either way it's fixed for me now and hope you get it sorted soon.

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a couple of things in there stand out - i assume it was offshore

1 - they cannot push a firmware update - there is a possibility [slight] that you were on old firmware and the reset initiated an update but i somehow doubt it - what i suspect is you got grade 1 BS from the agent

2 - if i read it correctly you got a new ip address - again thats possible but unlikely - changing from modem mode to router mode would give you a new ip addy but when you changed back you would in all likelihood go back to what you started with

VM do not traffic shape [as you put it] in any way these days - thats not to say faults on the line cannot reduce speeds but it a fault not a deliberate action - but if offshore sorted it or more likely the reset sorted it be happy

[ProTofik]

>The only thing that's changed is the dhcp assigned ip from VM has changed where as I could hold the same IP for months upon end.

That wouldn't do anything. When in modem mode I had my ethernet hitting a VM on ESXi host, so I used to frequently change MAC address of that port whenever I wanted new IP to be assigned to me. I tried that but it wouldn't help.

What firmware are you on now?

Also message to virgin since you don't monitor this thread anymore anyway: get your **bleep** together. We are not asking you what is wrong. Some of us are network engineers, we know what is wrong and we are asking you to fix it. 

[bmhughes]

Just to chime in to say I have exactly the same issue with the exact same symptoms as everyone else. It all started when I swapped my Superhub 2 for a 3 when 'upgrading' to the 350mbps package (somewhat regretting that decision now).

My parents had all the original issues with the early superhub 3 and modem mode and are now on the 500 mbps package but with a superhub 2ac (they managed to get it swapped with the initial issue early last year) and they don't experience the same problem.

It's obviously an issue with the Superhub 3 and if Virgin Media were even inclined to be helpful (and competent for that matter) they should be fixing it.

[ProTofik]

Virgin doesn't care. This thread is like a year old and they are refusing to acknowledge the issue.

[DavidJWalker]

on home connections are throttled on p2p/shared files you maybe have better luck on bussness connection beacuse they do not traffic manged on them the same as home connections