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GPR
03-01-2010, 11:51
Hi ,
Could I ask for some advice please?
I am on 10meg [L] and for the last month at around 5pm my speed drops to around 3-4 meg virgin have completed some tests and emailed me yesterday and explained The usage of the UBR is around 90% at peak times. Hopefully will be upgraded shortly - fingers crossed!


What is the UBR and are Virgin upgrading them?
How can I find out about my UBR.

Virgin have been brilliant and instead of giving me £10 credit each month they have upgraded me to 20meg so at peak times I should get the 10meg I am paying for.

Yesterday evening I took this speedtest. HERE (http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/7002/vmt1.jpg)

Which shows only 3.87 meg on a 20meg connection.

I am using a Netgear WNR2000 router hard wired to my computer.
I have tried connecting straight to my pc from my modem still slow speeds.

Any advice or help would be great.

Gary.

Peter_
03-01-2010, 12:06
Hi ,
Could I ask for some advice please?
I am on 10meg [L] and for the last month at around 5pm my speed drops to around 3-4 meg virgin have completed some tests and emailed me yesterday and explained The usage of the UBR is around 90% at peak times.

Hopefully will be upgraded shortly - fingers crossed!


.
Did someone actually put that in an email to you!

Ignitionnet
03-01-2010, 12:09
I'm sure someone else can cover the rest of it, however being upgraded to 20Mbit will make precisely no difference at all to your speeds at peak times. Whether on 10 or 20Mbit if 3Mbit is all that's available that's all you'll get.

uBR is the kit you connect to at Virgin. They are constantly working on them however whether or not this applies to your area no-one knows. Probably need to go to the newsgroups to get more information.

http://www.virginmedia.com/myvirginmedia/newsgroups/setting-up.php

You need the group virginmedia.support.broadband.cable

GPR
03-01-2010, 12:26
Thanks for the info.
Yep I got the email from a chap I had been speaking to on the telephone, I have been taking screen shots of the speed tests I have been doing and sent them to him in the retensions department.

Peter_
03-01-2010, 12:30
Thanks for the info.
Yep I got the email from a chap I had been speaking to on the telephone, I have been taking screen shots of the speed tests I have been doing and sent them to him in the retensions department.
Not really the kind of comments that they should put in print, but they are in the process of various upgrades so sooner or later yours will be done.

Sephiroth
03-01-2010, 13:20
Being a "someone else" mentioned by the great BBings, and being also a 20 Mbps user, I'll try to cover the rest of it. At 17:00 my 20 Mbps drops down to between 5 & 3 Mbps. I don't need more than this and my son games quite happily sharing this bandwidth level with me. Our UBR is not oversubscribed (yet) so it's only a speed drop we suffer, not latency for gaming purposes).

So. first let me say that if you post your problem up in the newsgroup, in addition to receiving a degree of sound treatment, you'll be able to look at other people's problems and do a bit of dot joining.

Second, the dot joining I['ve done by trawling the newsgroup and the forums indicates two classes of issue. (1) Users connected to a 50 Mbps capable UBR (specifically the Motorola brand BSR) have experienced disconnects due to an as-yet unfixed software bug in the BSR. Some of the non-50 Mbps users on the defective BSR may have been re-parented onto one of the legacy UBRs causing congestion thereon. (2) Other users were/are suffering congestion because of maintenance or rationalisation of the network. Their UBR would be taken down or something and they would be temporarily re-parented onto what's left with consequential congestion/contention. According to what I've pieced together, the result after this rationalisation would be a better load balanced network for the 10 Mbps users with the 20 Mbps users sharing the newer 50 Mbps infrastructure. It would seem to me that this rationalisation is a rolling programme.

The above speculation is supported by fact, but is not formally noted by VM other than in snippets of engineer conversation, letters disclosed in the forums, guarded technical responses on the newsgroup and the remarks here of one or two insightful people.

For those not used to a 17:00 downturn in performance, it should be noted that all this started to emerge in the forums in the first half of November. If you go through the forum from that time and classify what's reported you can plot the locations against time! It's possibly your turn.

On a more general scale, you'll see from what's reported in the forum and acknowledged in VM's "up to" contract, that at 15:30 speed falls ehen kids start coming home from school; at 17:30 it falls further as students come back from Unversity; at 19:00 it falls further still as the world and their dog finish dinner. Degradation begins tailing off at 23:00 but students keep it all going till 01:00, downloading giga-bits, streaming and so on. At the end of university term, their is some relief; it'll start again in the university towns in a couple of weeks! Maybe VM's re-balancing will assist.

But there is another potential factor which is oversubscription at street level on old infrastructure. It only takes one or two users bashing away with downloads to saturate the local capacity which brings us back to VM's upgrade to the locality; I have no information about this. I guess it needs a lot of street investment with modern oprical nodes, new lasers, new capacity strategies; maybe that's what they're doing in certain areas - pure speculation.

So there's the best picture I can put together for you. Unofficial and highly speculative; but logically sound!

GPR
03-01-2010, 13:28
Thankyou for your help , I am in the process of trying to join the newsgroup.

A friend explained If I had a adsl account say with 02 and my virgin media 20meg I can
bridge the 2 ,would this give me a greater broadband speed?

Sephiroth
03-01-2010, 13:53
Thankyou for your help , I am in the process of trying to join the newsgroup.

A friend explained If I had a adsl account say with 02 and my virgin media 20meg I can bridge the 2 ,would this give me a greater broadband speed?
Get your friend to explain on the forum how to do that and what he means by this!

I have both and when (and it's rare) my VM service goes down, I flick the wireless switch and go straight onto O2 ADSL.

Ignitionnet
03-01-2010, 14:57
Being a "someone else" mentioned by the great BBings, and being also a 20 Mbps user, I'll try to cover the rest of it. At 17:00 my 20 Mbps drops down to between 5 & 3 Mbps. I don't need more than this and my son games quite happily sharing this bandwidth level with me. Our UBR is not oversubscribed (yet) so it's only a speed drop we suffer, not latency for gaming purposes).

3-5 out of 20 at peak is pretty oversubscribed to be honest Seph. It shouldn't be doing that with any kind of regularity.

Your description of capacity upgrades at street level is semi-right. The actual plant itself isn't upgraded for most capacity upgrades just the number of subscribers sharing bandwidth is reduced through use of additional fibre, optical plant and line cards.

GPR
03-01-2010, 17:32
Sephiroth the below link is for the bridge option I spoke about.



http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781097(WS.10).aspx

caph
03-01-2010, 22:05
At 17:00 my 20 Mbps drops down to between 5 & 3 Mbps.

Seph, I've got to agree with Broadbandings here. You look like you are on a seriously oversubscribed UBR. 3-5 is a God-awful speed for 20Mb no matter what time of the day.

My latency didn't drop too much until my 20Mb speed went sub-1Mbit and then packet loss also crept in and online gaming became a thing of the past. I think I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for you just as much as the OP that you're both switched to the new network!

Sephiroth
03-01-2010, 22:21
Sephiroth the below link is for the bridge option I spoke about.



http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781097(WS.10).aspx

Ah. That's just a mechanism for extending a LAN over distance or to link different LANs. Nothing to do with the WAN which is served in the example from a single point.

---------- Post added at 21:21 ---------- Previous post was at 21:12 ----------

Broadbandings[/COLOR];34937994]3-5 out of 20 at peak is pretty oversubscribed to be honest Seph. It shouldn't be doing that with any kind of regularity.
[SEPH]: I don't check it with any kind of regularity because we simply don't see it as a problem. Oversubscribed? I'm sure - uptake in my part of RG41 was high - at least for CATV.

Your description of capacity upgrades at street level is semi-right. The actual plant itself isn't upgraded for most capacity upgrades just the number of subscribers sharing bandwidth is reduced through use of additional fibre, optical plant and line cards.
[SEPH]: This time I think I was more than semi-right, at least as to what I intended to be understood. I meant exactly what you meant and I was also thinking of the bandwidth between street box and CMTS, tired lasers,and so on.

Ignitionnet
04-01-2010, 10:32
Roger that just wanted to make clear the upgrades are largely done through addition of extra equipment rather than upgrade of existing stuff.

techyguy4
05-01-2010, 22:21
Get your friend to explain on the forum how to do that and what he means by this!

I have both and when (and it's rare) my VM service goes down, I flick the wireless switch and go straight onto O2 ADSL.

Must be talking about this. (http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/Shop/ShopSearch.asp?CategoryID=48&ShopGroupID=12&Alt=Yes)

Ignitionnet
05-01-2010, 22:41
Nah wouldn't need to flick a switch if running a router like that it would handle the failover itself, he is probably referring to just connecting to the O2 router instead of the cable router if his cable drops.

techyguy4
05-01-2010, 23:59
Nah wouldn't need to flick a switch if running a router like that it would handle the failover itself, he is probably referring to just connecting to the O2 router instead of the cable router if his cable drops.

Oh. I mean to say the friend of OP."A friend explained If I had a adsl account say with 02 and my virgin media 20meg I can
bridge the 2 ,would this give me a greater broadband speed."

Ignitionnet
06-01-2010, 00:00
Ah got you. The post you quoted confused me.