Is Virgin at it?
 

Ok, here goes.

A few weeks ago I noticed a significant reduction in my broadband speed (should be a 20Mb connection). Testing using download rate and the speedtest.net site revealed I was getting something in the region of 2-6Mb at best.

Few phone calls to Virgin, and in their defence they couldn't be more helpful. After one call I was asked to change the ethernet cable running from the modem to the router, instant change, up to 19Mb+. Fine, must have been it I thought. Next day though back to square 1. Another call.

While checking the speed from the modem recovered but there was still an issue with the router. Must be the router apparently, although I did say direct connection to the modem was also an issue. New router arrived, no change.

Another call, the Support guy said that my line was experiencing considerable packet loss and he thought it may be the cabling.

Engineer came out on Sunday...changed the cable modem, dismissed the cabling option, while muttering about the modem IP address getting hijacked ...ok, didn't argue with that just wanted to see where it was going. No change in the download speed when I asked for this to be checked, so it was arranged for his supervisor to come out the following morning. This he duly did and bizarrely once again the speed was back up to 19Mb+ - without them doing anything. Advised there was no problem so off they toddled.

By the afternoon the speed was back down to its usual. Checking London got 6Mb, checking Birmingham got 3Mb and Rome was down to 1Mb or less - these are the three I routinely checked. The results were the same connected to the router and directly to the modem. They were also consistent, morning, afternoon and at night. The only occasions when the speed went up was either during a call to Virgin or when the supervisor appeared on the Monday morning.

Last night I called again to report the low speeds, and you guessed it. Despite having low speed a couple of minutes before I called Virgin, during the call the speed suddenly recovered to what it should be. I mentioned this amazing coincidence to the support guy who chose to ignore the comment. I also said I'd be checking constantly to determine the speed after the call. The speed was 19Mb+ all of last night and again this morning when I checked... now that's unusual.

Now am I being paranoid here? Its is just coincidence? Has anyone else experienced similar?

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

Paranoid :D:D

And can you go to: 192.168.100.1 - root / root is the login and post your upstream and downstream power levels.

At the same time, speeds tests dont provide accurate results. Results, depend on server load etc etc

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

The power levels were fine, they didn't change in any significant way during the low speed indications and the high speed.

Granted about the accuracy of the speedtests, and if these had been random then I would have simply dismissed the results. What perked my interest was timing of the less than random changes in the test results.

You can't be too paranoid... well maybe.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

Its very likely the speed test server was under high load.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

Possibly, but the results were very consistent over the course of several days; (approx) London 6, Birmingham 3, Rome 1. The sites were checked three times per day, morning 8.00am, afternoon 2.00pm and in the evening around 9.00pm. The only time a change occurred was the during the aforementioned support contacts.

If no one else has experienced anything like this I guess I'll have to put it down to strange coincidence.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

It's possible that the modem is performing well after the tools at the VM support center get into contact with it briefly. Not really sure what I'd do after this. Perhaps you can use a friend to ping you and see if it improves in bursts.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

Couple of things i'd look at - connection - cables - wifi - router - modem. Etc

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

The ethernet cables, router and modem were all replaced. The wired connection only shows a very slight difference when connected to the router and when connected direct to the modem. Wireless is again consistent and there's no sign of unauthorised connections.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

Can you paste power levels please?

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

I'm at work at the moment, when I get home tonight I'll check the connection and post the power levels if the speed is down again.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

in a word - no.

:)

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

For a start there are some people on this forum who apparently work for Virginmedia so they will always say the company is great and the problem is with you and NEVER with them.

I have been having constant connection problems but someone said using speedtest is not accurate I dont know why but apparently its is not and even if it was its to be expected to get high speeds then low speeds "hi low hi low its off to another supplier I go";).

VM has gone downhill big time recently personally I think the more people who leave them and find another supplier the better they need a good kick up the rectum.

Any comapny that provides something that is excellent rarely has a queue in their support room but with VNM you need to wait 30 minutes plus what does that say?.

Good luck.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

It says that people phone VM because their Norton, McAfee or ZoneAlarm is blocking their connection as they clicked on something they shouldn't have.
It says that when VM charged 25ppm there was no queue and people stopped phoning VM for problems to with their security software, windows media player or to find out why they can't burn a movie from their My Shared Files in Kazaa direct to disk.
It says that people phone VM to ask for the security key for their Linksys router, why they think we'd know that I have no idea.

Then there's people call with intermittent problems that require extensive troubleshooting to determine the issue and that makes for a long call.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

You hit the nail squarely and firmly on the head, we get to many non Virginmedia calls.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

Doesn't every tech - I get the old "Your my webhost, can you build my website" Answer: For £4.00 a month no. You need a designer. CUSTOMER: Thats a disgracefull service i'm going to warn everyone about your company. TECH: Oh Jesus!

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

I have a lowly 10Mb connection.

Speed tests rarely report anything above 3Mbps and usually lower.

If I get a good download speed going ie > 500Kbps then the cable modem stops working within a few minutes.

All cat5e cabling has been replaced, the router has been replaced and the above problems persist.

Of course it could be cable modem or VM network issues but anytime I contact support and ask there is no problem with their network or the cable modem.

Maybe it is something to do with the number of people hanging off the same cable section(?) - or whatever the terminology is.

My finally arrived at point is that I do not see the connection speed I am paying for.

But VM tell me there is no problem...

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

they're short staffed? maybe their was an epidemic of 24hour flu

---------- Post added at 10:01 ---------- Previous post was at 09:11 ----------

there's always the possibility your saturating your connection and the 'cable modems stops working' bit is just that you have no more bandwidth left.

your right it could be

interface - again, could be right. Are you in a densely populated area, and do other people in the area complain about the same thing?

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

Hi bomber_g

What does "saturating your connection" mean?

I maybe should have stated that this occurs even if only 1 system is active here so there is only 1 download of any sort going on - no other connection at all.

That is not exactly a case of over-straining a connection.

Regards

Pete

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

Just climbed into this thread without reading all the responses. But I hope what I've got to say is helpful.

You obviously know what you're doing, especially spreading your tests around different servers. As I've said in other threads, Speedtest.net is unreliable IMHO.

I did what you did and in a c. 1 minute period did three tests at Maidenhead, London & Rome followed by two more tests immediately at Rome. (I'm on a 20 Mbps servive using a Homeplug bridge which keeps me down to c. 15 Mbps).

Maidenhead: 3.2 Mbps
London: 9.8 Mbps
Rome: (1) 13.2 (2) 10.9 (3) 7.9 Mbps

This told me what webcrawler250 has already told you. Namely (but in other words) that on the internet, anything could be happening at any time anywhere in terms of linbe or server contention.

I noticed also that my ping time to Rome was the same as to London (same number of hops).

This is a common pattern. One of the constants in this is the uselessness of the Maidenhead server. It always depresses results and that is why you were completely right in spreading your tests.

The wise men here correctly say that downloading a very large file or even two concurrently will provide a better picture over a longer snapshot period. These longer periods will more typically represent the instant changes that occur across the internet and the VM system.

It is clear to me from what you'gve written that you are "victim" of this instantaneous change when you call VM - a few seconds later, and the picture could have been entirely different.

So Speedtest.net and its ilk might be a tempting starting point but the acid test and basis of decision for clling VM when you think things are going slowly is to measure the time it takes to download a large file (say > 250 MB) and then to do it at least twice at different periods of the say. Sort of thing.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2009/10/5.png

Tried to numerous servers and this is the best result. I'm on 20Mbit...

Is this weekend throttling in action?

Downstream Receive Power Level : 0.7 dBmV
Downstream SNR : 37.3 dB

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

You would be throttled only if your activity was below the throttling threshold described on the VM web site.

What about real downloads and web experience? Speedtest.net is notriously unreliable.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

When downloading earlier, it seemed to be capped at 5Mbps. :td:

As for hitting the threshold, I know I definitely haven't reached it on the PC anyway. I have been playing a lot of PES2010 PS3 online though, but I wouldn't have thought that would be bandwidth intensive... surely?

It's only this weekend I've noticed it.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

Well the past few days speedtest has been consistantly reporting the previous low connection speeds, just to make sure I checked the other test Virgin ask and began downloading 200Mb+ files from the gamefiles.virginmedia.com site.

When I checked this during the last bout with Virgin's support the first downloaded at a little over 1Mb/s, trying two other files at the same time brought the same download rate for all three; three downloading at just over 1Mb/s each.

Checking the past few days hasn't shown anything like this. Tonight the there downloads were: 158kb/s, 167kb/sec and 168kb/s.

The modem has the following downstream figures:

Downstream Lock : Locked
Downstream Channel Id : 6
Downstream Frequency : 331000000 Hz
Downstream Modulation : QAM256
Downstream Symbol Rate : 5360.537 Ksym/sec
Downstream Interleave Depth : taps32Increment4
Downstream Receive Power Level : 2.9 dBmV
Downstream SNR : 39.6 dB

Upstream hasn't been an issue, its always about the same, here are the figures anyway:

Upstream Lock : Locked
Upstream Channel ID : 1
Upstream Frequency : 18800000 Hz
Upstream Modulation : QPSK
Upstream Symbol Rate : 2560 Ksym/sec
Upstream transmit Power Level : 47.0 dBmV
Upstream Mini-Slot Size : 2

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

No issues there so any problem is either with your equipment or the network.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

That's what I figured. Problem is that the equipment has all been replaced (both the router and modem) and Virgin deny there's any network issues.

Testing on pingtest.net shows no packet loss, Rome is 65ms, Milton Keynes is 25ms.

Two Windows 7 PCs and 1 Mac Snow Leopard laptop are all showing pretty much the same results.

Download speeds remain very poor though for a 20Mb line. Not sure where to go after this.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

Are we talking kb or KB in your downloads?

Also if 1 file downloads at rate X and if each of three concurrent downloads from the same source work at the same rate X what does that tell you? That the source is oversubscribed? Network problem? You're half duplex?

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

The downloads I mentioned are kb/s

To answer your second question(s): Like I said the issues are the same whether wireless or wired, Mac or Windows. The router and modem have been replaced and no network problems are reported in any of the tests I've tried, or in the system logs of the individual systems.

I've checked various download sources at various times. On Sunday morning for example, the Virginmedia games site had the following download speeds:

D3Demo.exe running at 173kb/s
CallofDutyDemo.zip 194kb/s
Third download ran at 194kb/s

All remained constant. When I checked this while troubleshooting with Virgin support the speeds were over 1Mb/s, that's what I should be getting according to them.

Microsoft Technet was running at 50kb/s

Since there seems to be such a disagreement about the reliability of various tests and methods, is there somewhere, someone or something that can give an accurate connectivity reading?

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

I suspect you've got your Mb and MB confused. A 10 Mbps line equates to c. 1 MBps (8 bits per byte + overheads).

If that's the case, 173+194+194 = 561 Mb/s.

It could be, as I said, that the games site is overloaded with people downloading; or the network is busy with people downloading stuff like mad.

Can we sort this Mb/MB thing out please?

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

Hi,

As I said, I'm on a 20Mb line, 20Mbits/s (well up to anyway). The downloads experienced from the virgin games site during checks with Virgin support were 1Mbits/s each for the three concurrent downloads. checking over the past few days has shown lesser speeds, typically the 173kbits/s - 194kbits/s for the same. The speeds have been around the same at Sunday morning as they are this evening.

I hope this has answered your questions.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

The problem is that you said in post #27: All remained constant. When I checked this while troubleshooting with Virgin support the speeds were over 1Mb/s, that's what I should be getting according to them.

You should be getting more than 1 Mb/s so what did VM mean? Very confusing and we've only got your story to work on.

Re: Is Virgin at it?
 

Well there's not much I can do about that, and yes it is extremely confusing. I have no idea why the results should change when contacting Virgin and then revert a short while after the contact, not unless something rather unsavoury is going on in the background. The results remain consistently poor up until the next contact.

Regarding the 1Mb/s I took that to refer to the download capability of the site rather than the line connection capability. The only time though I made that level was... yes you guessed it.. while contacting Virgin, since then attempting to download the same files from the site at various times on various systems has given me less than 200kb/s.

I'll give them another phone tonight but unless I anyone has any suggestions on how to achieve a cast iron reading independent of Virgin support then I'm stuck. All I can do is shift when the renewal is due.