Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

Glad You said that because that's exactly what a person did to me the other day from the other side of the argument in this thread.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

Just thought I'd mention my replacement super-hub is superb.

Was a nightmare waiting for it to arrive after being sent an ambit and delays due to weddings and bank holidays.

I was not very optimistic about it working like my original one did before the upgrade, however it's been brilliant. Not a single drop out. Super smooth networking and great wifi connection speeds.

All in all I'm back to being a happy customer, I'm just dreading any future updates!!!

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...011/05/107.png [img]Download Failed (1)[/img]

Regards.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

My has been the same since install without any issues.

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this is more proof that only a few superhubs have problems

he is infact complimenting the fact that his new superhub works ;)

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Be careful, You might end up being called a liar. Glad to hear you have a good one.

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So only a few superhubs have issues. Does this mean you no longer feel that the superhub is a pos? Or that it's a total waste of VM money ;)

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the one under my stairs is a pos, and i dont recall calling it a waste of money ;) :D

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As I've mentioned before and I'm sure others have the hardware isn't the problem it's firmware.

R27 is due this month, R26 was released the end of last month and rushed through after literally a couple of days of beta testing to fix major issues in R25. R25 went live on the 7th April, R26 2 weeks later.

There may be a hardware element to it as well, I don't know beyond that the Superhub I have is revision 2, and to get it to start to behave I had to offload all wireless functionality and LAN traffic onto another device.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

Thanks for proving my point about giving VM a bad name.

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in my opinion, its all sound with regards to hardware apart from the wireless which has an utterly terrible range at best, everything else is fine, they just need to work on the firmware

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The point I have been making is similiar.

If the superhub is used for very basic demand such as a NAT device with no port forwarding and no standalone LAN traffic it is 'adequate' for the job and will seem to be working fine. Since many people will only use it in this manner the impression may be got that the superhub on the whole is an ok device and its just a minority having issues with it when the better explanation is that its only a minority of people using it for anything remotely stressful. Your experience if anything supports my point as when you offloaded your LAN tasks to another device and disabled the wireless it stabilised and became useable. So I dont think there is "bad batches" and so on, I simply think some people dont use the superhub for anything stressful and as such dont see problems. There is the occasional person who has no problems after getting a replacement but that seems to be rare, those who have issues mostly continue to have issues when they get it swapped out.

My own superhub became stable after I set it up with DMZ to the dir615 and it was dealing with zilch lan traffic and no seperate port forwarding rules, in addition with the wireless disabled. Still bugs but was stable at that point of course I had almost made it into a dumb modem to achieve that.

I am not convinced its a software problem only, especially the wireless issues, ultimately tho whether its hardware or software the cause doesnt matter if it doesnt work, all that matters is if it works properly or not.

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No they don't, they take ownership, which is something we agree should always be the case, but they do have more flexibility that 1st line.

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To go into a little more depth on what I was told yesterday during the conversation I had with one of the aces in the CEO's office, VM is basically using two main kinds of UBRs across their network. One is made by Motorola, the other I didn't catch. It seems that the Super Hub is fine on one but problematic on the other. That's almost verbatim what I was told.

On top of that, I speculate that the manufacturing process is a little slapdash, meaning that on top of the UBR issue there are Super Hubs which don't work properly on any part of the VM network.

I also passed one of my tips on how to break a Super Hub: copy a large file (>4GB) from a gigabit ethernet machine to (for example) a wireless N laptop running at 300Mbps. In my experience at some point the Super Hub will hang requiring a reboot.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

The other is Cisco Kit.

The VMNG300 had similar problems at first.

Pity VM didn't learn then and specifically checked with their sloppy "extensive" testing before release.

AFAIK it only affects the upload rate and has nothing to do with the other reported problems with the POS.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

someone on here had an updated minislot size as they were having troubles with the upload speed, and it had been fixed by an apparent update, maybe worth a power cycle to see if yours has been sorted

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Thanks pip, it certainly was. Considering I have Cisco qualifications you'd think I'd remember a thing like that!

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do i take it that its still £30 to upgrade from 20mb to 30mb?

Being throttled to 4mb 24/7 when using torrents or usenet, very annoyed with virgin. Tried rebooting modem but doesn't help.

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If your speed is 4Mbit '24/7' then it's not throttling.

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phoned virgin support, they said this was the problem:

Upstream Symbol Rate : 5120 Ksym/sec
Upstream transmit Power Level : 55.2 dBmV
Upstream Mini-Slot Size : 4

the upstream power is too high they said, engineer coming tomorrow and will look at the cabinet and my modem. Hoping they might replace it with a new modem so that i might possibly get 30mb upgrade for free.

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Not if he puts a regular hub in

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i wouldn't have to pay £30 to activate the 30mb upgrade if i'm given a virgin home hub wireless modem/router thing would i? That would really suck:(

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

If you have an activated SuperHub on your account, no you don't have to pay.

If you don't have an activated SuperHub on your account, yes you do.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

I give the regular hub to 20meg customers, not a superhub

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

But thats not the company policy.

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Standard hubs should only be 10Mb and below and all 20Mb upwards should receive the Superhub, but I know this does not happen as we see customers calling in on 20Mb with standard hubs.

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Don't think that's the case actually. When 30Mbit launched existing customers upgrading to 20Mbit stopped getting the SuperHub.

If customers on 20Mbit want the SuperHub they have to pay the full cost for it, so any fault swaps should probably be either like for like modem or a 'normal' Hub

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

All new customers and replacements should be the relevant hub for the tier of service as that is what it says on the intranet weither it gets done in reality is something quite different.

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If 20Mbit customers are still getting SuperHubs for free then that's the process not being followed

XL 20 is now normal Hub only

It does say this on the staff information btw

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I'm told give out like for like. I.e a docsis 3 hub if they had a docsis 3 modem b4

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are the regular hubs and superhubs both capable of doscis3? Wouldn't it work out better for virgin if doscis3 hubs were given out to new customers and fault replacements so that switching off doscis1/2 will be quicker and cheaper as there would be less customers in need of a doscis3 modem.

replacements could be doscis3 but 20mb users given 20mb config files so that they don't get 30mb upgrade for free but if they want to upgrade speed they can without waiting for a new modem to arrive and postage costs?

would be nice if virgin had doscis3 modems without the wireless as i have a nice wireless-n router with dd-wrt firmware on, they'd be alot cheaper for virgin to buy.

Anyway i'll let you know tomorrow to see if my modem is replaced or if the cabinet across the road is tweaked to fix the upstream high power problem.

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Personally if I was vm, I'd only use a docsis3 hub and do away with the regular one

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jb66 thoughts on this?

my sister reported disconnections. (How she described it to me).

tech swapped her old modem and dir615 for the standard hub, if problem persists apparently she is getting a free superhub.

this is normal procedure?

When I asked her if she has an improvement I didnt really get an answer.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

D2 modem to D2 Hub could be if the tech didn't have any modems.

Getting a free SuperHub because a Hub doesn't resolve a technical issue certainly isn't

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Its not procedure, the superhubs wifi is worse for disconnects!

I only put a superhub in for 10 or 20 if I run out of regular hubs.

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engineer fixed my broadband now, QAM164 had changed to QAM256 he said, he's fixed loads of cabinets with this problem. He said its due to the rollout of 100mb.

Getting around the full 20/2mb speed now :)

Usenet is still capped at 10mb 24/7 though even though this violates virgin's terms of conditions, i should get 20mb until i download too much when it should go to 5mb.

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How many connections are you using on usenet? No trouble here maxing out 30mb on Astraweb or Supernews using 10 connections and would probably max out on less.

Use port 443 SSL to avoid the p2p/newsgroup file sharing traffic management policy, this will mean your newsgroup speeds won't be reduced until you hit the cap that is present for all downloads.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

Just had the engineer out, he has said that he knows there is a problem with some UBR and the 30 meg service going back out from the superhub. He was told last month that the issue would take 3 months to resolve but did say there wasnt a big push from virgin to resolve it as it was an up to service. Hence im getting 1.7meg upload.
He also said that if I was on the 50 meg service I wouldnt see this problem and would receive the full 5 meg upload, though I doubt this.

He wouldnt go into too much detail as to what specifically what the problem was..

So even with future firmware updates which will help the hub it will not resolve my issue, as it is some sort of configuration problem with certain 30 meg hubs on different UBR's.

So where does that leave me?

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

i use news.virginmedia.com, can't afford a pay one. Virgin's doesn't support SSL :(

xnews only uses 4 connections, when i try with binreader with 4 connections i get the same speed but with 10 connections i get 14-19mb instead of 10. I used to get full 20mb around 9 months ago then virgin must have dropped the max speed per connection. Binreader can't read newsgroups, it can only open .nzb files which is a shame.

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That sounds like a pack of lies.

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It is. 50mb uses the same platform, hardware, lines, and capacity as 30mb.

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VM don't always play by the book. This isn't always a bad thing. For example, when I upgraded from 10Mb to 20Mb, the member of staff had the superhub sent out (free, thank god) even though the Ambit 250 was fine. I think the idea behind that was to entice the household to upgrade the speed again soon, which would have worked if the superhub hadn't been so disappointing.

Then when I really wanted to upgrade to 30Mb (and soon to 50Mb or 100Mb no doubt) I was sent a VMNG300, which is again counter to regular policy. Combined with a 16-port ethernet switch I bought myself, everything on my home connection now has excellent access to both LAN and WAN.

It all depends on how much you're willing to commit yourself to politely contacting the right people and firmly insisting that you'd be a lot less disgruntled if you or other household members didn't have to keep rebooting the CPE to keep the connection steady. In my case I was, to keep myself and everyone else happy.

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I wish I could upgrade to 30Mbit and get the VMNG300!

I currently have 20Mbit with a rock solid SA 2100 cable modem but I'd like to have a higher peak time STM allowance which 30Mbit has but I don't want to risk that stability. I don't remember ever having to reboot the cable modem because of a fault with itself.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

have they not fixed the 30mb problems with the superhub yet or something? DOSCIS 4.5gbps has been tested recently i read, they use about 128 channels down and 24 channels up or something not really leaving room for cable tv. But still its incredibly impressive. Thought fibre would be the only way we could ever get gigabit in the uk maybe cable is a viable alternative afterall.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

4.5gbps DOCSIS is not viable in the UK with the current network design and contention ratios. Whether it will ever be remains to be seen but I highly doubt it. 1 Gbps over a 4.5G channel might just be passable but still would require hugely expensive overbuilds and pushing 10-100g fibre so deep into the network that you might as well build a new pure fibre network.

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Virgin have already tested 1.5Gbit using the existing network

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1.5Gb tested with a handful of people is not the same as a 1Gb/1.5Gb used by thousands of customers as the SuperHub as proven VM are not really that interested in viable/reliable testing.

The VM net work is creaking like an old warship with the recent 'upgrade' to 100Mb hence the constant dropped packets that start at 4pm and last until about midnight.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

exactly, i read that 400mb is the max the superhub can handle, i don't know why virgin don't buy their hardware that will last for years, they give out non-doscis3 modems and still give out some non-h264 v+ boxes. Maybe the virgin staff get paid for short-term performance and don't have an incentive to look out for the long-term success of virgin, a bit like the banking crisis.

If i were virgin i'd give gigabit capable doscis3 modems and modem/wireless routers for those who want to pay extra for 1 of those and stop giving out the scientifica v+ boxes and instead sell the boxes and modems that don't meet those requirements to a foreign cable company. Doesn't make sense to have customers upgrading their modems and boxes every few years when we know cable is capable of gigabit so 400mb superhubs should never have been given out, they should be gigabit capable.

I'm still quite annoyed that virgin messed up the 100mb upgrades as my broadband went from 20mb to 2-7mb as the QAM codes had changed and the cabinet across the road needed changing. Why didn't virgin remotely update all the cabinets in the country instead of leaving customers with slow broadband without them being informed. Poor management by vm for the 100mb upgrade.

I wonder what virgin will do for customers when they release 200mb as most ethernet ports in the uk are only 10/100. Will they give out pci gigabit cards or pcmia gigabit cards for users who don't have gigabit ethernet. Alot of users would have no clue how to install a pci or pci-e card. I can see alot of customers furious with vm whenever they decide to upgrade to 200mb as a result of not having gigabit ethernet ports. Virgin would probably have to charge customers who have 10/100 alot of money for an engineer to install a card as most people have never opened up their desktop case.

Is 100mb a new tier now? 10/30/50/100mb, are those the tiers for new customers? Bt infinity averages at 37mb for customers and apparently they will be upgrading it to 80mb from 40mb soon which would be very tasty.

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Maybe because it's not cost effective?

I'm not aware of any consumer kit that can handle 1.5Gbit, and if there is it's probably exceeding expensive.

As for the non-H264 V+ boxes, it's irrelevent. Virgin don't use H264 on the network so whether V+ boxes do or don't support it isn't needed

---------- Post added at 10:37 ---------- Previous post was at 10:35 ----------

Based on that, if you ran Virgin they would probably go bust very quickly

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lol, nah. I'm sure you could make a gigabit doscis3 modem with no wireless router built into it pretty cheap. And as for the scientifica boxes it wouldn't cost much to stopping giving them out, just give them a samsung box and flog the boxes to another cable company abroad. once there's only a few scientifica boxes in use upgrade those customers to samsung or tivo and switch to h264 for hd broadcasts. giving customers scientifica is just prolonging the inevitable.

Glad i can use dd-wrt on my own router, wouldn't want virgin's wireless. Wouldn't suprise me if the govt is able to remotely view what all wifi devices are doing using the superhub either. Thats a benefit to not having a router or wireless from virgin no spying of internal traffic wired or wireless. Not that i have anything to hide personally i just hate our surveilance state.

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And you are basing that on what information?

---------- Post added at 10:52 ---------- Previous post was at 10:49 ----------

You wouldn't be able to sell the boxes to other CableCos as they would have been built specifically for Virgin Media and their network.

Anyway, if you don't want VM to have MPEG2 only boxes, why would you assume others would want to increase their stock of them?

As has been said many times before, Virgin do plan to migrate all customers across to TiVo eventually, but any company will maximise their assets including any in stock kit for as long as possible.

---------- Post added at 10:54 ---------- Previous post was at 10:52 ----------

But this is getting off topic for this thread

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Ha haaa Yeah he would probably run the company into the ground running up billions in debt hahaa..Ohh.ermmmm oh erm hang on a minute?????????

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They can migrate my service any time they like, as long as they don't want any more money from me.
Why should this thread be any different to all the others?:D

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You know, a lot of threads only get interesting when they run off topic. Just like pub conversations, comedian observations etc. :_

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My understanding now is that you can only get the 30mb service if you take the new superhub, and it costs £30. Is this really the case.

Reading the beginning of this thread, gave the impression you could get a free upgrade, but it isn't really if you have to pay £30 to activate the superhub.

Please can someone clarify.

Thanks.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

You've alway had to pay the £30 activation fee, for most customers on XL 20 there is no additional monthly fee - thats the 'free' bit

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If you already have the VMNG300 you don't need a Superhub, otherwise you will as your modem won't be capable of using the new network or getting the new speeds.

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That's not strictly true. I got a superhub on the upgrade to 20MB and didn't pay the £30 fee. I guess there's a degree of levity with certain support centres, presumably the ones in the UK not offshore being more likely to rule bend in the name of customer satisfaction, which is A Very Good Thing Indeed.

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I was on 20MB until Monday. I had an old 200 Modem and this has been replaced with a superhub because I was already on 20MB.

I went up to 50 MB as it only cost me £6 extra, but I wonder can anyone tell me if:

1: current 10MB customers - will they automatically get 30 MB? My mum is on 10MB and won't upgrade as she won't pay any more so is waiting for upgrade.

2: I was told by the engineer that fitted my superhum that from next year (not sure exactly when), the minimum speed that VM will provide to new customers is 30MB. Do I assume that everyone on 20MB will go to 30 MB automatically and when?

3: Will a 200 MB service be rolled out and if so where and when?

Thanks.

PS I notice a chagne in my mum's service - 10 MB but 929 k upload - was 512 until very recently.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

1) No one without a SuperHub (or VMNG300) can get 30Mbit

2) Haven't a clue although again, no-one can get 30Mbit on old kit

3) Haven't a clue

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

Thanks for your reply. Sorry - I was saying that I was on 20 and as a result got a superhub when the engineer came on Monday. I just wonder whether customers still on 10 MB will automatically go up to 20 soon?

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Haven't a clue

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Probably a similar chance to all 30Mb customers getting a free upgrade to 50Mb and all 50Mb customers getting 100Mb.

Look out for a bloke with horns, red skin, and a pointy tail carrying some ice skates.

Of course I guess it will eventually happen though.

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

Ben,

Just read your above post - I currently have 20MB with a SuperHub. I've been considering upgrading to 30MB as the price is the same I believe. Could you just confirm then that as I already have a SuperHub, the £30 "activation fee" would be waived as that was the one thing putting me off.

Cheers

Superblade

Re: [Update] ALL 20>30Mb upgrade discussion
 

That's correct

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Thanks Ben, I'll call in when I get the chance.