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.

[Topbloke]

Slow UDP is a needle in the haystack issue, requires so much fault testing and time to be honest.

But if you don't get any slow speeds in downloads or speedtest when just using Virgin broadband directly connected Ethernet to PC, really any VPN provider with UDP protocol that is decent now adays should give you almost similar performance as you had without the VPN use (excluding the 10MB issue)

Most VPN providers do roughly say you can expect a 10% if not 30% loss in speed so that is normal.

For example, I can cue up 20-30 torrents from this public torrent site here:

http://bt.etree.org/

I can max out my download speeds without a VPN @ 22MB, but with Mullvad VPN (UDP) just using the mullvad windows 10 vpn software I can get 18-19MB but since I am under a VPN that is still more than fast enough and good performance and not far off from my max speeds.

Other issues I have personally found is you may have to try several VPN companies, I found expressvpn the fastest, but they are pricey also and again you can't just connect to the closest server on the list, you have to try several that are close for example with mullvad I can connect to a Manchester 1 and get 13MB but when I connect to Manchester 2 (a different server on same mullvadvpn provider) I get 18MB, yet there both in Manchester so it makes little sense.

Other factors of course are you need to have a good performance PC desktop, 4 CPU cores and 3ghz+, 8gig Ram+, SSD only and windows 10, if you are using anything older or the old mechanical hard drives to download your content it may grind slower, everything should be downloaded on an SSD for full speeds really or at least you know it's not HDDs or software causing a fault.

Another issue I have found is the cabling, sometimes faulty cabling or bad hub3 can cause worse udp performance with VPNs, I once had to change my entire cabling, I found disconnecting all VM cable tv boxes in the home and just connecting directly to the hub router showed full download performance while under a VPN, so I knew the splitters/cabling was at fault, the VM engineer agreed and simply redid all the wiring and splitters and never had slow udp again after.

All routers and VM cable boxes should be the latest model really (hub3) and V6 boxes, that way the signals are better balanced and handled overall.

The part where I suggested it's a needle in a haystack it really is.

[dinth]

Sorry for hijacking the thread, but i believe ive been experiencing a very similar issue for past year or so, except its worst. Here's my thread:

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Speed/Had-stable-full-speed-on-100M-VM-connection-after-upgradi...

Long story short:

1. Im also using SH3 in modem mode with pfsense (although i tried different firewalls and the problem exists regardless of pfSense)

2. The issue started when my connection was upgraded from 100 to 350 and SH2 to SH3. 

3. It's not only torrenting what triggers it, another big trigger was BBC iPlayer in HD mode (im not sure if it's TCP or UDP), but even happens with Microsoft Teams (defo uses UDP)

4. Orginally the issue was occuring without any abnormal internet usage besides standard WWW browsing, after 1-2 weeks from last modem reboot.

5. Issue occuring on its own looks to be fixed now - VM engineers have replaced my modem with a different SH3 and the upstream line. Unfortunately it still occurs when running torrents or heavy downloads. 

6. Restarting the modem fixes the issue for a short period of time.

7. The connection drops to between 10Mbps and a 2-5 kbps (!!!) with a huge packet loss. 

This is super annoying in times of IoT, when everything from fire and burglar alarms to the lawn watering system and vacuum cleaners are depending on internet connection and the internet connection is more often not working than working. 

I want to try changing my modem to router mode to see if the things will get better. Have you guys had any issues with pfSense talking to the internet through SH3 in router mode? Is there anything i should know (like best configuration) before switching to minimize downtime? 

[MikeRobbo]

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@dinth wrote:

Sorry for hijacking the thread, ... snip ...

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If you want assistance you need to start your own thread.

[dinth]

@MikeRobbo, there is a thread which i have linked in my previous post. Just saying that i have been pestered by same issue for past year or so and similarly to the other people above, my problems seem to be related to SH3 and UDP traffic.

[Moogera]

Dinth

Same,I've posted a few times the problem is sh3 not handling UDP protocol

I had hoped when my VPN was recently updated to the latest version of open VPN it would solve the issue but nope 1-1.5 mb download speed on UDP still 

I will stay with the TCP protocol which does a regular 27 mb download speed

[dinth]

OK here's the graph showing what happens to my network connection if i run a VPN tunnel (with UDP enabled, will need to test it with UDP disabled) with roughly 100kB/s traffic on it. (the top graph is 24h, while bottom ones are 48h so they are not aligned). I had the tunnel on yesterday evening, just for a couple of minutes, this morning for maybe an hour and right now and the spikes of ping/bandwidth are clearly visible at those times - average ping goes up to 2000ms and speeds go down to almost.

I could understand VM if they would ignore a problem which is affecting only torrents, but heck we are five months into a lockdown where most people are working from home and even Microsoft Teams (also uses UDP) is unusable. 

 

[dinth]

Cannot edit my previous post anymore.

Just wanted to give an update that after changing the VPN tunnel from UDP to TCP, not only the max speed in tunnel improved 6x times, but the internet is now usable on all my other devices (ping around 15ms, speedtest showing full speeds) 

[Moogera]

Yep that's the only way I've managed to get it up to speed by using TCP protocol

[dinth]

Sure, but while my personal VPN works fine with TCP, i cannot do much about the configuration of my companies VPN. 

It is extremely frustrating, Ive been struggling with my network for over a year, for past 6 months ive been trying to work from home, doing all my MS Teams videoconferences over a phone with 4G (reception in my area is bad but still better than the connection quality over VM broadband), using companies VPN with 5kbps speeds, etc.

I've been contacting VM support many times, they told me to chase my walls to replace the cable in my house (as the house was just refurb'd and the cable was plastered over), they replaced my modem and the uplink cable under the street, and just today, on a community forum, i found out that this is a common problem with UDP packets, which i needed to troubleshoot and confirm myself, and VM fails to acknowledge. Its really hard to even describe how upset i am now. 

[dinth]

I have created a collective thread for this issue (is this one has a very generic topic) https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Speed/UDP-issues-on-SuperHub3-collective-thread/td-p/4382720