Virgin Media Community

[andrewcr]

Hi,

I've been experiencing packet loss during much of the last 4 days. Please see the latest attached BQM:

I have restarted the SH3 (big red spike on BQM) but this has not helped. Please can you investigate?

Thanks,

Andrew.

[munrobasher]

Can't help directly but can recommend installing EMCO Ping Monitor. Very handy for monitoring packet loss and high pings over an extended period.

[andrewcr]

Thanks. I have run some simple ping tests from the command line, such as ping -n 100 virginmedia.com. These tests also show some loss consistent with the BQM graphs.

[munrobasher]

I've successfully used the logs and graphs with clients when speaking to their ISP to highlight long term problems. It's also useful to ping the internal router as well as that will allow the internal Wi-Fi network to be diagnosed. If the pings/packet loss are high to the router, then it's not the external connection and focus can turn to the Wi-Fi network.

[andrewcr]

Ok thanks. I've downloaded it and will give it a try.

[andrewcr]

The ongoing packet loss vanished for a few days but has made a noticeable return from about 10 am onwards this morning:

Andrew.

[Travis_M]

Hi @andrewcr

Thanks for posting on our community forum

Sorry to hear about your issue, how has your connection been over the weekend? Have you noticed any improvement whatsoever?

Regards

[andrewcr]

Hi Travis,

Thanks for getting back to me. The problem vanished on Friday evening (22/04) around 6 pm. As I mentioned in my last post it returned this morning at around 10 am. So it was basically not an issue over the weekend. There is another on going issue which I have also experienced. It is discussed in this thread:

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Networking-and-WiFi/VM-CORE-NETWORK-FAILURE-URGANT/td-p/4986440

However I do not think that the 2 issues are connected. The core network issue seems to occur over a 1-2 hour interval in the evenings and may be partly related to utilisation.

I have been monitoring packet loss using the ECMO ping monitor to host virginmedia.com for the last few hours. The stats am I getting are:

Packet loss 0.59% (21/3549).

Although not terribly high it is still far higher than normal as it is usually zero.

Thanks,

Andrew.

[munrobasher]

Just some comparisons. I use EMCO ping monitor to bbc.co.uk and 1.1.1.1 (CloudFlare DNS). Last week packet loss on 1.1.1.1 was 1.13% and 1.16% on BBC. Over the last hour, 1.1.1.1 0% and bbc.co.uk 0.16%

[andrewcr]

Thanks for the comparisons. I see that your weekly values are higher than mine when compared to the virginmedia.com host that I am using. However, it can be seen from the my BQM, there is loss over an extended period. This is not usually visible at all, hence I suspect something is amiss. I initially thought that this might be related to the ongoing Core Network issue (which is happening again right now) referred to in a previous post.  But other users live BQM graphs that I have seen do not show the same loss over extended periods. I have also set up a host for pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com which I believe to be the server used for the BQM pings. This is currently showing 1.02% (36/3499) loss which seems to show some consistency with the BQM graph.

Thanks,

Andrew.