Please Please help me :[
 

hi there.

let me first explain the situation here.
we are 6 rooms and 7 people living in a shared house in Edgbaston Birmingham.
We have a Virgin internet 30mb with a super hub which is located in the Living room, ground floor.
there is one empty room on the ground floor and we have 3 rooms on the first floor and two rooms on the second floor.
Im living on the second floor.
given the nature of the location of the superhub, we all use wifi connection.
We (or better to say, I) have this problem with the internet for 2 years now, and day by day it gets worse.
I am the only one in the house who plays online multiplayer games, CoD BO2, CoD AW, BF3, BF4, BF Hardline and LoL, on a PC.

now the problem;
at first, i got high pings on weekends, ok no big deal, i know others are at home using internet. so i moved on playing my games on week days. was fine for a while. then after sometime could not get good, playable pings at the evenings after 17:00, ok no big deal, ppl came home and now are using internet. some other folks in the house also complained that they get no connection to the superhub and our landlord purchased them a NetGear Powerline+wifi thingy.
things got better for a while, but then, bad pings and disconnections started at weekdays mornings too (when no one is home). I got so frustrated that i went forward and purchased a BT Powerline Extender for me self.
was good for a while, then got worse than bad. went back to wifi, the same problems are there, that is:
on the weekdays, mornings or late nights when the ping is good (30~40 ms), i join servers and play for 2 to 5 minutes, some random lags here and there but thats ok. then my ping spikes first to 140, then comes back to 40. ok. then to 250 and back. ok. then to 400, 500, 600, 999, then to 1037!! then i get kicked from the servers though i am the top player. just feel my frustration!!!
http://imgur.com/06mAapw
http://imgur.com/IcU6PbV
can not play my games at any time at any day, the service just got worse and worse every day.

things i have done;

- turned down the router for 10 minutes then plug it in again.
- contacted Virgin Support
- reset the router to factory settings
- contacted Virgin Support
- rebooted the router
- contacted Virgin Support
- tried wifi connection to superhub, wifi connection to Netgear, powerline connection to superhub, all the same results
- contacted Virgin Support
- disabled IP Flood Detection in superhub
- contacted Virgin Support
- re-installed windows 8.1 64 bit
- contacted Virgin Support
- re-installed all the drivers
- contacted Virgin Support
- installed ASUS ROG GameFirst II
- contacted Virgin Support
- uninstalled ROG GameFirst II
- contacted Virgin Support
- whined to my landlord
- contacted Virgin Support
- cried to my landlord
- contacted Virgin Support
- called my landlord names behind his back
- contacted Virgin Support
- used my 3 mobile's internet and i got a steady 120 ms ping no spike
- stopped using my 3's mobile internet as my 500mb allowance got used in a jiffy
- contacted Virgin Support
- port forwarded UDP whatever it is
- contacted Virgin Support
- Prayed to Jesus
- contacted Virgin Support
- got dissapointed at Jesus as it seems he does not know/care about technology
- contacted Virgin Support


and everytime i contacted virgin support, they said "oh there is no fault on our side, try wire connection to the superhub", or "upgrade your contract to 100mb" or "buy this, do that"

totally a shut up and suffer situation with Virgin Support.

im hopeless, is there any way i can fix this and have a round finished without getting kicked?

if not, im gonna force my landlord to switch to BT instead of Virgin.
oh Lord...
sometimes my download speed is 7 bytes!!!! I swear, no joke!
my friends ask me if im joining the servers from Africa or something!
even there is a Vietnamese guy joining from vietnam in my server and he gets better ping than me.

anyone, any suggestions, any help? please?

p.s. i might as well move t Vietnam, seems they have better internet services there!

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Sure you don't have housemates doing, well, pretty much anything with 7 people sharing 30Mb download and 2Mb upload, while you game?

Appreciate you've had issues with WiFi and Powerline in the past but this seems to make sense to me.

Perhaps your landlord could take a slight hit on his rental yield and upgrade to a service more appropriate for an HMO.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

you see, i understand if my housemates are at home using the internet, but when they are not at home - Monday morning, Tuesday morning, Wednesday morning, Thursday morning - then there is no excuse for bad pings and getting kicked from the servers now, right?
when im joining a server on the times i mentioned my ping is like 30~40 ms, but then sky rockets after some minutes of playing. i did not have this issue at first, its a recent issue. read my post carefully, im using this internet for 2 years now.

one thing i forgot to mention is the random disconnections, meaning that for 2 to 4 minutes the internet connection goes out, so i would be still connected to the super hub but there is no internet, it comes and goes sometimes by seconds but that is enough to ruin my game.

---------- Post added at 15:06 ---------- Previous post was at 14:55 ----------

see these:
ping before joining a server;
http://imgur.com/j5CsSlS
ping after 5 minutes of joining the server;
http://imgur.com/fpi6Mcg&DnCenkd

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Get yourself one of these going

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

how this would help me?

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Your room mates don't have to be home if they have a torrent client seeding/downloading ;)

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

i promise you, my housemates dont even know what torrent is.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

buy a router? and put the superhub in modem mode, especially as you say you're all on wi-fi spread out over several floors.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Its only an extra £5 per month for 100/6meg. I didnt know the sh1 could work two floors up!

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

yeah that is what I was going to say. There are multiple factors which can affect your connection and the fact that you are getting sporadic spikes means there is a utilisation issue somewhere like Igni has intimated. The ping monitor he wants you to setup tracks the pings over the internet to your shub (not pc) and will let us see if there is an issue with your internet connection or your network connection (lan) between the shub and pc. It will look something like this:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2016/03/1.png

The biggest problem you have got, like jb has suggested, is that the shub is absolutely diabolical for wireless. I know you have probably been told it is the bees knees and seen the advert on tv for perfect at home multi user use but it isn't. If you are all going to use wireless you really need to buy a proper router which can sit next to the shub and the wireless on it will be far superior. We can recommend some good ones for £50-60 if you want to get your housemates to chip in. The powerline adapters can be a bit flakey as well because the connection/speed you get is entirely dependant on the quality of the electrical cabling in the house.

The best thing you can do to satisfy your curiosity is wait for a morning when everyone is out the house, disable wireless on the shub (so you know no dodgy downloads are going on) and run a patch cable from your pc to the shub so you have got a direct wired connection. Your connection to the shub will be faultless for all intents and purposes and any ping issues and reduced download speed will be to do with your wan connection on the VM side. If you are in a student area you might find your local node is massively congested and that is why you'll notice such huge swings in performance between morning (when nobody is home) and the evenings and weekends.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

It's probably not a utilisation issue. Utilisation doesn't cause apparent disconnects or ping spikes in the morning unless incredibly bad.

Go to http://192.168.100.1 and you should see in the top corner a link for the modem stats. Please post them. I suspect your upstream power levels might be too high.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

My bad, should have been clearer. When i said utilisation issue i was referring to high lan usage resulting in saturation on the wan link. i.e he could be playing a game quite happily and as soon as somebody in another gets the torrents going his connection is screwed. Tbh if you can get 100/152 for ax extra £5/month i would go for it because it is oodles more juice for the 7 of you.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

all right, thats better now, i get quite some useful answers here, many thanx.

dear General Maximus,
- ok i am going to run that tool and post the results here asap.
- please recommend me a good router (£50~60 price range or a tad bit higher) so i can force my landlord to get one and please tell me if switching to 5Ghz would help. (my current PCI-E wifi card is a TP-Link TL-WN881ND 300Mgps 2.4 Ghz, and i use a ultra gain wifi antenna thats probably why i can connect to superhub 2 floors below. note that switching to 5Ghz will cost me a lot of money and if it does not help then maybe it would be better for me to know before-hand.
- what you say is completely true about powerlines
- i can not connect my pc wired to the superhub, i need a stupidly long CAT5 cable to the living room (50 meters?) and taking my pc to the living room is such a headache (2 floors up and down).
- as i said before, this is totally a new situation. before i could play on weekdays mornings but now i can no longer do that. so in the last 2 months something happened that stops me from playing my games. the question is what would it be?
- last time i called Virgin Support they said a 100mb internet would probably cost us £100 a month, that why we have not upgraded it yet. my landlord pays something like £20 ~ £30 a month for our internet.


dear Ignitionnet:
I presumed you meant this;
http://imgur.com/QlxhVxj

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

that's not true, my 152/12 is £25/month. Like jb said above, it would only be another £5/month for 100mbits and it would be well worth the jump because it is less than £1 each.
5ghz is defo the way to go and the more of you that you can get to use 5ghz the better. For those that can't it doesn't matter because any good router you get these days will be simultaneous dual band. I was going to not recommend a Linksys router for the first time ever but I couldn't resist the temptation :p Have a look at these two. Either of them will offer a high level of future proofing and longevity for your landlord because they use the new ac wireless technology. I suggest you take the time for a quick google and read some reviews about wireless performance and stuff.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-LINK-Arch...437610&sr=1-11

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Linksys-EA67...linksys+ea6900

Rather than laying into your landlord and saying the shub is ***** I would suggest you go down the lines of "it is budget equipment supplied by an isp for free. The model you currently have is first generation and because of the problems we have been having I have found out that it is very very bad for wireless connectivity and unfortunately that is what we need the most as there are so many of us in such a large property". He/she might feel more comfortable trotting down to PC World and listening to the rubbish they come out with but warn them, they'll pay the same amount of money in PC World for a low end router compared to a more mid-range you'll get off the internet. E.g. what you can get off Amazon for £50 they'll probably charge you £70 for and for that price you can get something far better.
Tbh dude, depending on how long you are all planning on living there it would be worth you coughing up the dosh yourself and keeping the router when you move out. I would definitely have the discussion about the extra £5/month for 100mbit. 30mbits just isn't enough for 7 people.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

many thanks for the advice.
now im going to ask you about a different scenario. please tell me which would cost less; new router + plan upgrade or:
landlord pays for each room to have a wired connection. so each room will have a CAT sticking out through the wall.
in this case, do we need a new router?
how much approximately it would cost? is it more expensive than your suggestion? will it provide with better performance? what will the performance per £ be with wired plan?

by the way, the routers you did suggest are well above £50~60 price range, and given the fact that they are on sale at the moment prices may change in the future. are there any other suggestions?

about http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping ;
do i have to have java script installed? and how can i share my results with you? on my screen its just an empty graph, how does it work?

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

in an ideal world you would have cable running throughout the house providing wired connections to all the rooms but if you was actually going to put it through the wall to wall jacks it cost £hundreds. The cheap way to do it would be to connect an 8 port switch to a router/shub and run cables from the switch under carpet to each of the rooms and just have a loose cable coming out somewhere in each room. There would be no installation costs and the cable itself is as cheap as chips.

I can not over estimate how important wired connections are. It sounds a silly way of putting it but wired connections give you a 100% pure and unimpeded connection to the router. Basically you'll have a 1gbit lan and you don't have to worry about interference. pings or anything else because all your traffic is moving at "wire speed" and over the short distances you are talking over you'll have a ping of less than 1ms to your router. If there is ever anything wrong with your internet connection you know (for the most part) that it is your outside connection to VM that is the issue and not something in the house. That being said, there are still lots of things going on like peak time congestion which I mentioned earlier which can still prevent you from getting 30mbits all the time.

If you wanted to go with plan b for as cheap as possible then you would buy a good 8 port switch (£40), you would need to keep the shub in router mode (not ideal) and run the cables round the house as I have suggested.

If you wanted to do it properly (which would be worth it in the long run) then you would buy a new router and switch, put the shub in modem mode and connect it to the new router. Attach the new switch to the new router and run cable round the house. Upgrade the package to 100mbits and allow everyone to either use wired connections for static devices like pcs and you still have the new super new wireless for tablets/mobiles etc.

It sounds like a bit of a faff but it is like putting a skeleton in somebody's body; once it is in that is it and it will continue to benefit you everyday in so many ways for years to come. I don't expect your landlord will go for it at all but in case you were wondering I would say £140 for super duper new router and switch and £70 for 7 x 50m cat5e (here)

The important thing to emphasise and what I am sure won't be appreciated at all is the fact that you are putting the network infrastructure (albeit minimally) in place to provide fast and reliable internet access throughout the house which is going to require no maintenance and will continue to work for many years to come. The wan to lan throughout on routers these days far surpasses what VM are going to be able to give you for the next 5 years or so so you/he won't have to worry about replacing anything. It is a sound investment in performance and enhancing your quality of life and once it is done that is it; it is a one time charge.

If you want a router for the £50 mark go for either of the ac1200 variants on those links.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

I promise you, your problem is a problem local to yourself. I guarantee you that your issue is not something Virgin can solve and if it's not a torrent that one of your housemates has got going, then either someone is using your connection without your knowledge, someone's PC (possibly more than one) is a zombie in a botnet or there's just a lot of wireless interference nearby.

This is why Virgin tells you to try via a wired connection, to rule out wireless as being a problem. Wireless is incredibly flaky and there's no way for Virgin to guarantee any level of service wirelessly. This also means switching to BT or upgrading your connection isn't going to help. You're on the right track buying a new router, but I implore you to do some more testing to determine where the true issue lies before spending any money.

Step one: You need to do a wired test. You can't get around this. You need to find out if it's wireless or not and frankly, it's almost certainly wireless that's the problem. However, you also need to make sure it's not your housemates causing the issue, either. The easiest way to do that is to perform your wired test with wireless on the hub disabled (and nothing else plugged in). You can push the button on the front of the hub to turn the wireless off. Easy peasy. Do that, do a speed test on a laptop wired into the hub and see what happens.

Still slow? Try another laptop, just to be sure. If it's slow, call Virgin and report a fault. That seems unlikely.

Getting your 30mbit? Okay, you've then assured that the problem is local. Now you need to find out if it's Wireless or a housemate. Put wireless back on, change the wireless password (to temporarily kick your housemates off), then do another speed test and try some gaming. If it's still ******, wireless is the issue and you either need a better router or to invest in some decent powerlines, if not, your housemates are the issue.

Now assuming your housemates are the issue, you now just need to figure out if one of them is doing something stupid (torrent, virus, etc.) or if it's simply too much traffic. A quick way to determine this is to just look at the wireless light when nobody's home and you're trying to game. If it's flashing a lot then traffic is going through it.

All that said and done, 30meg is not enough for a 7 person household. It's just not in this day and age.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

I did realise I had a twin ;) The world is very lucky

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Another option: having put the SH into modem mode, connect it to the router (located in your room) with a cat5e cable. Connect your PC to the router with a cable. Your housemates will benefit as well as the wireless router will be closer to them.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

This is probably the first thing he should have done.

---------- Post added at 10:00 ---------- Previous post was at 10:00 ----------

It'll tell you what the problem is.

---------- Post added at 10:01 ---------- Previous post was at 10:00 ----------

I've had the SH1 working over half a mile up.

---------- Post added at 10:03 ---------- Previous post was at 10:01 ----------

Given that doing the latter legally would cost hundreds, possibly thousands, you can't be serious...

---------- Post added at 10:06 ---------- Previous post was at 10:03 ----------

That, and it does nothing about having a router or internet connection that cannot handle the load

Trust me, you can impede a wired connection.

Truth is if they get a professional contractor in to do the work chances are they'll try to sell them some enterprise networking kit along with it and refuse to fit a consumer router.

---------- Post added at 10:08 ---------- Previous post was at 10:06 ----------

Never mess with Kushan's promises.

Going from 3Mbps upstream to 20Mbps upstream and the highest upstream bufferring in the UK to the lowest, will help nomatter whose fault it is.

Agreed. 2.4Ghz wireless is bad enough. 2.4Ghz wireless over multiple floors shared with a dozen devices is practically unusable on even on a good day.

And a 50M ethernet cable is barely £10-15 on ebay.

The TBB graph will show that well enough on it's own.

I grew up with a 64Kbps connection in a 50-person household.

---------- Post added at 10:09 ---------- Previous post was at 10:08 ----------

Oh god, two of you?!

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

I know, but I didn't want to over complicate things and in the context of what we were talking about wired connections are pretty much perfect compared to wireless on shub1.


yup, although this is a perfect opportunity to correct my typo, I missed "n't" off the end of did

or you could just get the one for £9 which I posted the link to on Amazon (maybe I am your twin as well)

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

ISDN? wow you must have had rich parents, that was expensive when the rest of us had 28000 modems, hitting around 2.3

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Lol, they really should make links stand out more! :p:

Mmm. Amazon Prime eligible, free next-day delivery if I order within 3.5 hours. It's gonna be dirt cheap quality at that price though.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

30MB is perfectly fine if you had a traffic shaper policy going... You may need a enterprise router/firewall for that though. Best thing to do is try by wire... I got sick of my connection 3 floors up! When the builders were doing the roof I got a Ethernet wire pulled up to my room and it has been bliss!

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

If you have multiple people playing games that require 1-2Mbps upload each on a connection with a throttled upload of 1.05Mbps total, 30Mb is not perfectly fine.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

yeah, 30/2 sucks ass and I am only one person. I can guarantee in my house that while I am bumbling around doing stuff on my pc that someone else is playing a game in another room and someone else is streaming stuff on tv in another room. Things have moved on big time in the last couple of years and I used to get excited about 120mbits and 152 thinking it was ample juice, but now I am thinking about 300/20. I have always enjoyed having more than I need just so I have got the peace of mind that I know everything is going to work no problem. We'll probably be having this conversation about 1gbit in 2 years time.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Yeah the upload sucks... forgot about that!

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

30mb down and 2mb up between 7 people i would say is the problem.

If you are gaming and say 2 of your housemates start to stream ur upload would get near depleated and i wonder if this is the cause.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Oh, I didn't realise it was still 2Mbps up - I was assuming 3Mbps (10:1). At 2Mbps the throttled speed would be 0.7Mbp. I've seen modern shooters use burst to over 1.5Mbps upload with a single client.

Apparently my address, which didn't have a cab thus no FTTC, was originally planned for FTTP until BT decided to give up. So close to getting gigabit!

(Actually, FTTPoD would be dirt cheap for us as our property is about 40m from the nearest NGA node with nothing but grass between us, but alas FTTPoD has been put on indefinite hold).

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Sadly the most BT offer via FTTP is 330Mb down, 30Mb up, so not that close to getting gigabit yet :)