I'd been having a little bit of bother with my connection for a few weeks, general browsing worked fine, speeds were pretty much on the mark for my account, The only issue I had was with on-line gaming, every time I tried to play games such as MMO's the router would reset it self and stay on a constant flashing white lite cycle, the only way to sort it was to fully power the router off, leave it for a few minutes and then power it back on. Things would then work fine for anywhere between 15 minutes right up to a full 24 hours.
My first thought was over subscription in my neighbourhood but a quick look at the utilised ISP's in my area showed that not many people were on Virgin Media, so no one was gobblng up available bandwith like Scooby snacls.
Secondly I contacted the help section of one of the MMO's that I was playing just in case it could have been some sort of issue on their end, I know, extremely unlikely and almost virtually impossible.
Finally I decided to utilise the Virgin Media app on my phone to see if it could spot any issues.
First time I ran it, I forgot I was still on the wifi connection, router reset and I lost the connection. Had to wait for everything to reboot, settle down and then restart the process.
Second time there were issues with the app communicating with their servers, couldn't log in successfully for 5 or 6 hours (good job VM)
The third time (yep third time lucky) I ran the app, followed all the instructions, pulled, pushed, disconnected, reconnected, switched everything off and back on, finally hunted down something small enough to push the main reset button (great tip, if you have a sim removal tool, keep it handy as they are great for things like this).the test ran successfully, noticed there was an issue and allowed me to book an engineer.
Two days later and Ted the Techy arrives (sorry I can't remember his actual name but he was great, friendly and easy to talk to, so well done VM and if you have his name or job number, pass on my thanks for a job well done).
So, here we are a few hours after the technical emergency and things seem to be running fine. There's still an issue of a flooded connection node/box to sort out which is being done in the next few days or so, but my connection is working 100% now, no disconnections from my games and the router hasn't reset once.
So.....
Wanna see what the main problem was?
Check out this piccy of a piece of the cable he left as a souvineer,
It's a little hard to see in the picture but I'll try to describe it.
This is a small section of cable handed to me by the engineer exactly as he'd removed it from the ground. The copper section had entirely disintegrated and had rusted up inside the cable a good two or three meters, he didn't bend the cable, that was the position it was in when he uncovered it.
Now, like I said at the beginning of this post, 99% of my connection worked fine, browsing, youtube videos, wifi connection to all my smart speakers, all worked great. the only problem I had was online gaming.
The copper portion of the wire was completely split, no physical connection between them and they weren't even resting against each other. There should be no way at all that I was getting such a strong and stable(ish) connection, but yet it worked almost perfectly. Both myself and the engineer were surprised I had any sort of connection and I'm sure just like myself he's wondering how the darn thing worked.
So there you go, a rather amusing littlle tale of my connection issue, now if you'll excuse me, I've got a few days on online gaming to catch up on.
