Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Wow that's really nice, looks like they have this figured out & I hope I can get that too!.

Thanks for posting back and letting me know its working good for you now

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

What a shame I didn't check the internet before deciding my office broadband should be upgraded from the 152meg dynamic service to the 350meg static IP service. The attraction was the increased upload with static IP a bonus as we are seeing more VPN type connectivity.

The install of replacement Hitron Virgin Media Router was fine on Monday. Since then the upload has been as expected, around the 20meg mark. But frequently speed tests show we don't even get the 20 meg as a download.

As others have posted the static IP implementation seems to be very flawed. Having spoke to the techy VM faults team they remain amazed VM are still selling it, especially without warnings. I'm told they get about 5% of customers having a problem. That is a lot.

I'm now waiting for a downgrade to dynamic IP to be implemented, and then I'll revert to a DDNS type system to track possible IP changes. Far from ideal but for our current use it's workable. But really static IPs on a business service should be common place, and not rocket science.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

The downgrade to dynamic IP usually takes less than an hour.

Funnily enough they sent an email today saying "We need to let you know about some maintenance work that will be taking place on our network, as detailed below. We will be upgrading the software on our network device at Perry Barr to improve performance."

Planned Work Start (Local UK): 24/01/2018 00:01
Planned Work End (Local UK): 24/01/2018 02:01

This might be the fix for the static IP problem as it lists all of our Voom fibre connections as being affected by the outage.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

I got the same outage notification for the same date/ time.


I am on the trial firmware for the Hitron, and have been since early December. Since then I have been getting a solid 350 Mb/s down with no more slow downloads since that change. I know some central infrastructure needed changes too, but the combination has, so far, appeared to have fixed the issue for me.

My contact at VMB tells me that the majority of feedback from people with the trial firmware is good, and that he was expecting to hear about wider roll out soon.

Hopefully this issue will be resolved for all soon.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

We had a couple of notified outages earlier this week. I checked with techinical support who said they were nothing to do with the fixed IP problem. They said they had no specific release date for the release of a rollout of the firmware to fix it, only a date of "Q1" which he said could roll till the end of March. He suggested I fill in an official complaint form on the web to get a confirmed date.

Today I had a call from UK customer service, first trying to get me to switch to the dynamic address which is not what I want. He then told me we had been notified of some maintenance on the 24th and that was to fix the "fixed IP" issue. This guy was not technical and went into b*llsh*t mode when I questioned how an upgrade to a server in Perry Barr was going to fix the problem that seemed to need a Hitron firmware change. He could not tell me.

I guess the Perry Barr server may be part of the issue. Perhaps the triallists do not go through it? Anyway let's see what happens on the 24th but I suspect the Hiton firmware may come later than that.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

The full fix isn't just around the Hitron firmware. While that is part of it, the network end of the GRE tunnel terminates on equipment that also needed firmware updates I gather.

It is a combination of these things that contribute to the fix. As part of testing my GRE endpoint was moved to a trial area within the VMB network and even on the old Hitron firmware this resulted in a great improvement. So this could well be related to the fix and pave the way for the Hitron firmware to go beyond the trial.

Current performance:-

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2018/01/1.png

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

The firmware trial has now been closed and next step to proceed with roll out.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

I assume there has been updates by now but the service is just as bad now as it was 6 months ago. Still getting sub 30Mb/s on many of our connections

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

The new Firmware is rolling out in batches - what version do you have?
Since the change I've had very good performance.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Software version 4.5.10.173-UPC on the hitron.

---------- Post added at 13:07 ---------- Previous post was at 11:21 ----------

Looks like the GRE endpoint is down. None of our Voom connections throughout the North West are working and all saying they can't connect to the GRE endpoint.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

That is the correct and latest firmware required for the performance fix.
I assume you have restarted the Hitrons? if so this sounds like an infrastructure fault for VM. I am in Surrey - the GRE tunnel is up and running here, so maybe a regional fault.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Yes most of our sites are around Manchester so it must have been a regional issue. They all just came back online about an hour ago.

Running a speedtest I'm currently getting 170 Mbps, which I guess is an improvement.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

in Manchester my self and had really bad connectivity issues so had to have the latest firmware rolled back :(

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

We had the same outage on Friday and it looks like a larger network issue than anything to do with the Hitron itself. The connection recovered without intervention from us shortly after lunchtime (after about 2 hours loss of service).

Since we had the new firmware (a few weeks) the speedtests are fast and the Thinkbroadband graphs show only small amounts of packet loss when the connection is loaded.

There are still serieus issues though which seem to be specific to routing issues where we pop out from the tunnel into VM's backbone (which seems to be in Manchester).

What we can see is that certain websites either timeout (and get reset from the remote end) or take forever to respond.

Some of the worst websites I found are VM's own. This seems to be a routing issue in their network. See the traceroutes and ping test below. Anyone else seem this, before I attempt to report this to faults?

---

C:\Users\abc>tracert www.virginmediabusiness.co.uk

Tracing route to ssl.www.virginmediabusiness.co.uk.c.footprint.net [8.247.6.189]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms xx.xx-xx-xx.static.virginmediabusiness.co.uk [xx.xx.xx.xx]
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 16 ms 18 ms 56 ms perr-core-2b-ae16-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.138.249]
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 28 ms 18 ms 17 ms brnt-ic-1-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.254.42.198]
7 19 ms 24 ms 23 ms m686-mp2.cvx1-b.lis.dial.ntli.net [62.254.42.174]
8 23 ms 18 ms 21 ms 213.46.174.110
9 27 ms 30 ms 28 ms ae-1-51.ear3.london2.level3.net [4.69.143.198]
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.

Trace complete.

C:\Users\abc>ping www.virginmediabusiness.co.uk

Pinging ssl.www.virginmediabusiness.co.uk.c.footprint.net [8.247.6.189] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 8.247.6.189:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

C:\Users\abc>ping www.virginmedia.com

Pinging www.virginmedia.com [213.105.9.24] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 213.105.9.24:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

C:\Users\abc>

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Hi APS, I've run the same traces from our network, which is separate from Virgin Medias... From Level 3 the trace does exactly the same thing, also the Virgin Media web-sites don't respond to pings.

My hunch is that you're experiencing an MTU issue, have you tried lowering this on your computer?

What happens when you run this command from a windows command prompt?
ping -f -l 1472 bbc.co.uk

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

When I do this it fails as follows:

C:\Temp>ping -f -l 1472 bbc.co.uk

Pinging bbc.co.uk [151.101.64.81] with 1472 bytes of data:
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Ping statistics for 151.101.64.81:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

After experimentation I can found that only if I set the packet size to 1272 or less does the ping work, e.g.

C:\Temp>ping -f -l 1272 bbc.co.uk

Pinging bbc.co.uk [151.101.0.81] with 1272 bytes of data:
Reply from 151.101.0.81: bytes=1272 time=27ms TTL=54
Reply from 151.101.0.81: bytes=1272 time=22ms TTL=54
Reply from 151.101.0.81: bytes=1272 time=23ms TTL=54
Reply from 151.101.0.81: bytes=1272 time=26ms TTL=54

Ping statistics for 151.101.0.81:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 22ms, Maximum = 27ms, Average = 24ms

I checked the MTU size on our router, which is set to 1460 and then on my PC, which reports:

C:\Temp>netsh interface ipv4 show subinterface

MTU MediaSenseState Bytes In Bytes Out Interface
------ --------------- --------- --------- -------------
4294967295 1 0 1243690 Loopback Pseudo-Interface 1
1300 1 14060178541 12688986132 Ethernet

So it seems the PC is already set to a relatively low value of 1300 (I am not sure why it may be some CISCO VPN software I run occasionally).

Interestingly since my last post the VirginMediaBusiness website is now accessible (and fast with no changes at our end). The tracert is still lengthy though.

I still cannot access the standard Virginmedia.com website.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Hi Aps, it looks like your maximum MTU is 1300 (1272 + header of 28).

Usually your router would clamp the TCP MSS or fragment the packets (when PMTUD fails to work), however it doesn't look like this is working correctly currently.
Can you edit the MTU within the superhub? That may however cause more issues if the tunnel is before where the MTU is set, but I'd assume it's on the LAN ports?

Alternatively if you alter the MTU on your machines to 1300, you should find the internet starts working again.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

I think you missed one detail in my message above and that is my PC is already set to an MTU of 1300 bytes which is why the ping fails until I go below a packet size of 1272. The router is set to a higher level but a value of 1460 I was told (a while ago) should work best for the GRE tunnel. As the PC has a smaller MTU than the router and it is quite small I do not think any changes to it will have much effect.

I also pointed out that 95% or more of websites work quite well with no delays or timeouts. It is only a few and now notably www.virginmedia.com which I cannot connect to. It would seem strange if the MTU setting only affected some websites?

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Let’s assume for a moment that the Virgin Media web-sites are working... From your trace route you provided, they look similar to mine.

My best educated guess is that they have an MTU greater than your PC’s interface, thus for example they are sending your MTU packets of for example 1500... Either your PC or router is then responding to send a smaller packet by PMTUD, however as they are set not to respond to ICMP, they aren’t listening, so they send the same packet size again!

Set the MTU either as 1500 on both your router and PC, or the next largest allowable. I have a hunch that could resolve your issue...

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

I tried those tricks and it made no difference. There are certain websites that take forever to access or timeout (not this one). As I mentioned before many Virginmedia sites are the worst and this one "http://community.virginmedia.com/" never responds via the Hitron/fixed IP connection.

Interestingly I can access the same sites on my home VM connection, but like kev445 I can also see that this is despite the fact that traceroutes to many VM sites go through 60+ hops and never succeed.

I will be doing further tests later today from a laptop to take our own router out of the equation, before I call in with a fault report.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Very weird activity going on with my business line here in Surrey as have received four planned outage notices:

C00906745 - 13/03
C00906533 - 14/03
C00898275 - 21/03
C00905905 - 27/03 to 02/04

Must be something major going on to require all of those! Line is still stable but no reboots on the Hitron as of yet. Shame they don't give details of what is happening, apart from saying it'll impact the Cable Modem itself - doesn't appear to be firmware related as still on 4.5.10.142-SIP-UPC with an uptime of 66 days :confused:

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

could be local work that will affect your connection. I have had that at times when they moved me to a new CMTS.
I believe the new firmware roll out has completed now - maybe your Hitron didn't get the reboot it needed to load new firmware. You may find if you restart it you will get the new firmware, which appears stable.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Cheers CCarmock. Kinda had my hand forced by a power outage but even upon reboot and another reboot, just to confirm, no new firmware downloaded.

Hey ho, one of the later outages will probably get it to me

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Have they sorted out the packet fragmentation yet?

About a year ago I discovered that that MTU on VM Business is 1300 when using static IP with the Hitron.

Now that in itself might be OK and any packets larger than this with the DF (don't fragment) bit set result in an ICMP "Fragmentation Needed but DF is set" error.

The real problem is that it appears the Hitron silently discards packets larger than 1300 bytes when the DF bit is not set.

The only "solution" I was offered was switching to dynamic IP, which I did. But then port forwarding doesn't work and they were not able to fix that.

This was a year ago. Are things any better now?

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Pretty much nothing has changed in that aspect. The firmware they are testing for the static IP has minor improvements for some people but it seems to depend on your location and what GRE Tunnel you are on.

As for the SH3 the general BQM issue they are releasing a firmware that makes the BQM look nice and pretty but doesn't actually fix the latency spiking issue.


I've had to go through a formal complaint to get out of the 12month contract with VM Business as static can't perform more than 20mbit's for me at most times and dynamic really isn't an option.


I still find it puzzling that they are still selling this Static IP GRE Tunnel product which is not fit for purpose..

I now have 2 VDSL lines one with Uno and one with AAISP incase of a failure.


Probably look into geting a router that can load balance to multi threaded downloads can reach the 160Mbit.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

I was having issues with static IP's and the GRE Tunnel in 2014, that really is unacceptable it's still not fit for purpose in 2018.

The only real saving grace is Virgins dynamic IP's can go years without changing. I've had one IP change since getting rid of the static ip block 2014.

I've set our pfSense firewall to update a DNS record if the WAN ip changes. That's fine for our VPN, however certainly not viable for all usage scenarios I know.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

So as a necro bump (as it's been a while), whats the opinion on the static IP option? Is it still recommended to stay away?

Only ask as my first year is up with VMB so looking to renew for another 2 years and wondering whether selecting the static (especially as I'm a high bandwidth user) is a good option or to stick with dynamic

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Oh, you're serious.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Stick with dynamic. The GRE tunnels they use for static seem to kill performance. This hasn't changed. Dynamic is pretty static in reality anyway.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

interesting - as the changes they made have completely fixed the static IP issues for me. Initially I wasn't affected and then performance took a huge dive, but now I get great performance....

https://www.cableforum.uk/images/local/2018/08/13.png

This is with the 5 static IP routed subnet option, using a DrayTek 2960 behind the Hitron

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

cheers for the feedback guys. Shall give static another go and if not switch back to Dynamic.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Please do report back with your findings. My contract is coming up for renewal!

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Hi guys, Sephiroth asked me to move my post over here, so here I am!

Here is my post from the Virgin forums, to save me from typing it all again:

Sephiroth also asked me to post my power levels (apologies if this is incorrect):

Downstream Overview
Port Frequency (Hz) Modulation Power (dBmV) SNR (dB) Channel
1 298750000 256QAM 0.200 38.605 21
2 170750000 256QAM 0.800 38.983 5
3 178750000 256QAM 0.700 40.366 6
4 186750000 256QAM 0.700 40.366 7
5 194750000 256QAM 0.700 40.366 8
6 202750000 256QAM 0.300 40.366 9
7 210750000 256QAM 0.600 40.366 10
8 218750000 256QAM 0.100 40.366 11
9 226750000 256QAM 0.500 40.366 12
10 234750000 256QAM 0.500 40.366 13
11 242750000 256QAM 0.300 40.946 14
12 250750000 256QAM 0.000 38.983 15
13 258750000 256QAM 0.000 40.366 16
14 266750000 256QAM 0.100 40.366 17
15 274750000 256QAM -1.300 38.983 18
16 282750000 256QAM -0.100 40.946 19
17 290750000 256QAM -0.100 38.983 20
18 306750000 256QAM 0.000 40.366 22
19 314750000 256QAM 0.600 40.366 23
20 322750000 256QAM 0.900 40.366 24
21 402750000 256QAM 0.700 40.946 25
22 410750000 256QAM 0.800 40.946 26
23 418750000 256QAM -0.100 40.366 27
24 426750000 256QAM 0.300 40.366 28
Upstream Overview
Port Frequency (Hz) BandWidth Modulation Power (dBmV) Channel
1 25799985 6400000 ATDMA 41.000 4
2 32600015 6400000 ATDMA 41.000 3
3 46200000 6400000 ATDMA 42.750 1
4 39400000 6400000 ATDMA 42.000 2

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Just to say that on the basis of the power levels, the dropouts you are experiencing are not down to the dynamic part of your circuit (the bit between the Hitron and the local VM hub site).

For what my opinion is worth, your problem may lie in both your router and the Hitron firmware in not being robust enough to handle multiple routable IP addresses in modem mode.

I hope one of the gurus in this thread can help you better than I.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

I have the 5 static setup that you have with a DrayTek router behind the Hitron. I do not suffer performance issues any longer - though did when those problems were prevalent.

The connection has been very stable on the whole and performs well. As you say in multi static mode the Hitron performs no NAT, so is close to modem mode while still supporting the muti-static IP routing.

Interestingly recently I have had a few instances where the cable connection is stable, the GRE tunnel is marked 'Connected' but no traffic passes and requires a restart of the Hitron to restore service. It's rare that that happens, but it does happen.

Suggest when you get this situation connect tot he Hitron Web interface - check under Status -> DOCSIS WAN to see that you are connected. And then under Admin -> VMB IP Service to see that the GRE tunnel is Connected. If both check out OK but you cannot pass traffic then you have the same situation I have.

I am going to drop my contact in VMB a note about that.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

I am only using one of my five static IPs, I should probably mention that.

Sometimes I run into an issue where I simply cannot get a connection, no matter how many reboots, though this is rare. I can usually fix this by switching to a different IP in my pool (which defeats the purpose of having a static).

But today is one of those rare occasions. (they seem to be getting more frequent).

I have just tested this again now, and I am still unable to get any internet via my usual static, but switching to a different one via my MikroTik's settings gets me back online.

I called Virgin tech support this morning, and they told me there was as issues in the last few days with static IPs, but this should have been fixed.

I am pretty confident is does happen while both the WAN and GRE tunnel are connected. I went to check again now while trying my usual IP, but alas, the Hitron GUI refuses to load. (another issue I frequently experience, I was told by a Virgin engineer that this is quite common?).

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Interesting - the Hitron interface failing to load is something I have never experienced. The old Business Superhub did this all the time, but never the Hitron for me.

Would be interesting to see if our problems coincide - I wonder if it affects all or multiple people at the same time

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

As a bit of a follow up, I have tried swapping IPs around without rebooting.

My usual IP (I am not too concerned about revealing my public IP, but for ease I'll refer to it as 50) will not provide me any internet currently. The Hitron GUI also fails to resolve while 50 is set in my MikroTik.

Setting it to 51 in my MikroTik allows me access to both the internet and the Hitron GUI at the moment.

Actually ignore that, in the time it was taking me to write this reply 51 lost connection (and I couldn't resolve the Hitron GUI). So here I am on 52.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Crass question this: If your IP address range starts at aa.bb.cc.50 then your gateway (set in the router) would be aa.bb.cc.51 and your IP address accessed through the gateway would be aa.bb.cc.52.

Are we in that area of fiddling around?

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

So according to the PDF I was sent from Virgin, my range is aa.bb.cc.48 - 55

48 is the network IP (not sure what this is for)
49 is the gateway (already set in MikroTik)
50 - 54 is my pool
55 - no mention of this in the PDF

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

Morning update:

.52 stayed up all night, which is quite unusual, I typically have at least one disconnect over night.
Also, without rebooting any hardware, I tried to switch back to my usual static (.50) and everything seems to be working fine again.

I really have no idea what is going on.

Re: New VM Business service - 350Mb
 

I've been a VMB customer for 3 to 4 months now, and prior to that I did a lot of research and read a lot of reviews and different scenarios regarding the static vs. dynamic IP addressing.

In all the time I've had the 350Mbit service with 5 IP's, I have never had any issues that a lot of others have had, and regularly get 400Mbit on speed tests (usually always over 360Mbit)

It's good to see they're finally sorting some long standing issues out... I just hope that with my upgrade from 5 to 13 IP's that the service carries on working to the same level. :D