Honesty from VM
 

Hi all,
Warning Rant ON
I know from my own experience and looking at the plethora of threads on the "official VM Forum" that there seems to be a significant issue with capacity and peak time broadband speeds. Folks getting upgraded from one package to another suddenly see their service deteriorate, its not right.

Different folks all over the country are seeing similar BQM and speed test profiles. The one thing no one is seeing is any transparency from VM.

Is it really too much to expect VM to "man up" and actually explain the magnitude of their problems, what they are doing and how they are planning to fix the situation? I would actually feel better if somehow VM were more open and actually declared what they were doing technically with a published programme of works and regular project updates.

I appreciate that the staffers who post on here can't say openly what they know but please can you push back up inside the organisation to get someone to provide some proper information, realistic timeframes and evidence of accountability for getting things right. I used to be a real cable advocate but the last six months I have seen the other side of the service, and its not good.

Sorry rant off.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

I'm one of those affected... and so far ignored by VM staff on the official forum.

100down/6up changed to >85down/10up after the free "upgrade".

I don't know if I'm angry or sad, but I'm definitely frustrated.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

Virgin is undertaking a big job as they are in the process of upgrading a lot of the old CMTS to the new Arris CMTS this lets them roll out 16 Downstream this takes time, And with the Hub 3.0 Rolling out to new customers it will start to improve but it will take time And they are doing the most overloaded areas first,

Re: Honesty from VM
 

Thats great, but, why won't VM publish a schedule of areas due to be upgraded and which are priority? Visibility of the programme would be great.

How do I know if I am in priority area or not, I appreciate its not your fault and you have provided some info but I really do think the firm should provide open honest communication to customers have been mis sold products, or at best had products mis represented.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

It does look like its a country wide problem and the network just cant cope at peak times.
I was on 152mb and my connection was good even at peak times.

Got the free upgrade to 200mb, new superhub 2 and now peak time speeds are all over the place
Sometimes 90mb, upto 130mb but its not consistent and is all over the place.
Why move people onto the new speeds when the network cant cope. I would have been happy staying on 152mb and having constant decent speeds.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

I am not sure all the overloading is just a CMTS scaling issue? A lot are waiting on physical network changes e.g. node splits etc. If it was just a headend resource solution then surely it is fixable in short timescales rather than timescales of months or years we see.

Also, VM will *never* say how many customers are impacted by over utilisation as it is a very commercially sensitive point. Imagine how much fun BT would have with this data

Re: Honesty from VM
 

Oh definitely. BT could have the most brilliantly targeted marketing ever.

It is a pain though - people can have no idea what the state of the network in an area will be like when they sign up for Virgin Media's service, and watching the forums it feels like fix dates are endlessly pushed back.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

If the regulator had a pair and could demand they publish data just imagine how focussed VM management would be to get the issues fixed....

Right now, based on their official feedback from the support forum, it feels like they don't give a f***** f*** for the customers just so long shiney new ones keep signing up.

Personally I would like the regulators to publish information on the various ISP's & Telco's. I'm sure folks on here could think of five or six key metrics all ISP's & telcos could be scored on that would provide insight in to the overall service delivery of each supplier.

Network Capacity & Contention by area
Network uptime
Lead time for new install in provisioned area
%age of installs that require a second visit
Comparison of published speed vs actual speed off peak/peak. Sam Knows type data.
Billing accuracy
etc.


Based on my experience I am sure VM would score well on some metrics, for example I have had really good experience with network uptime, scheduling of engineers for the occasional defect fix etc. its not all bad and I'm sure other suppliers would score worse in some categories you could think of. Not publishing utilisation data makes it impossible for the customer to make an informed decision, in fact the way VM promote their service when they know they have these national issues is tantamount to mis representation.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

This is not a new thing. It happens every year they do the round of upgrades to new speeds. Always adding new people before capacity is ready in the area.
Blame the marketing lead side of the company.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

Some areas are never ready for any upgrade never mind the upcoming one. VM have a problem: they own a patchwork quilt of inherited/acquired physical networks each with own challenges of topology/demographic mismatches, ageing fibre etc. infrastructure, etc.

BT had the luxury, so it seems, to design and deploy a newer, technology wise, network into a far more devolved, fine grained solution. As a result, their ability to react to localised network loading problems seems far more reactive and sophisticated.

VM has to convince its shareholders (1st) and customers (2nd) that it is "competing" with BT whether it can or not.

VM is between the devil and the deep blue sea: it can't be honest with its customers when they face an area loading problem because this would admit the disadvantage they face in these areas. Consequently, they play a game of smoke and mirrors where customers who face a network issue are told:

1. there isn't an issue and send customer off on wild goose chase
2. when it is so obvious that there is an issue, they will then admit it
3. they will assign pseudo-random fix dates fundamentally decoupled, process-wise, from the real work on the ground (assuming it has been a) triaged, b) planned c) resourced d) budgeted and e) tasked)
4. they (mostly) mandate that the customer waste their time to ring and claim a rebate for a patently evident loss of service

I think that OFCOM should work with SamKnows to collate a representive, statistically meaningfull set of VM customer line stats and publish them on map, alongside a similar set of BT data points. This map should flag in a some kind of colour coded way the level of peak-time degradation.

This would be interesting :)

Re: Honesty from VM
 

Perfect....if it shows the deviation between contracted and delivered speeds

This would allow the customer to make an informed choice, and would focus the minds a bit more of the VM Senior team.:dunce:

Your commentary on the fix dates sounds very scarily believable....

Re: Honesty from VM
 

What a superb summary, thanks so much for this.

One potentially awkward point though, is that especially when "longstanding" congestion areas are solved - I presume through new CMTS mainly - how future-proof such fixes are.

In other words, if resolving congestion (either on broadband or Tivo-legacy) takes substantial work, then how much future planning is built into that work, to avoid congestion occurring within a reasonable timeframe.

I'm potentially speaking from experience here, having presumed (hopefully not in error) that fixes would last a decent amount of time.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

More down to the basic nature of the networks each is using than any devolved, fine grained solution.

That and VM's planning criteria. BT upgrade cabinet backhaul well in advance of congestion, VM simply don't.

http://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local...area=E14000652

You can see the cycle of congestion, speed uplifts, and resolution of congestion really well there.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

Very interesting. Looks like roughly 6-12months each time serious congestion hits. That fits with my experience on both Tivo & broadband until now.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

That data is brilliant. Shows how bad Warrington has got though:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2016/01/6.png

Re: Honesty from VM
 

Although it shows the service going down it still doesn't show the day / night issue though. That average speed is skewed by the good daytime performance as in the busy periods its nowhere near 30Mb, more like 3Mb.....

Right now I'm running nicely at over 100Mb on wifi. but give it four hours and it will be cripplingly slow again.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

I agree, the key is the peak/non-peak deterioration. My 200M speed will go down to ~20 in the evenings e.g.

from:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2016/01/4.png

to:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2016/01/5.png

---------- Post added at 15:38 ---------- Previous post was at 15:25 ----------

My point exactly: BT's network design is more devolved plus they had the luxury of coming to the Fibre party later than BT.

From what I see, it isn't backhaul [network] that is the VM problem, it is the loading of the network segments into the headend .. or this what you are saying here?

Re: Honesty from VM
 

Hedgie, how's your speed? Just did a speed test on a Saturday afternoon/evening:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2016/02/6.png

I also seem to have 16 Downstream channels.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

Speed not the best for a 200Mbps line, Fix time around april F004203245

I have 10 Downstream channels.

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2016/02/8.png

Re: Honesty from VM
 

I really am disappointed, every time there is some kind of development at VM I hope they learn from their old mistakes, which is allowing people to upgrade without proper capacity to handle the higher peak time demand, but it seems they make the same mistake time and time again. On this most recent upgrade it seems to have got worse tho with people in previously good areas even reporting performance issues. :(

It does seem to be a situation where they care more about marketing speeds than actual peak time consistency (the time when most people will use the connection).

Re: Honesty from VM
 

I think the problem is a tricky one. They want to be able to advertise those headline speeds as early as possible, not 2 years after initial deployment started. However, they don't really want to spend a lot of money advertising 200Mbit only for 85% of new customers to be told they can't get that. Sort of defeats the point of the advertising (and like the ASA would have words as well). So of course, they relent and let new customers sign up to those speeds, but then they have that issue where existing customers are "getting screwed" over because why shouldn't they be entitled to the same things new customers get?

I'm not saying I agree with it, it's obviously a bean-counter decision and the quality of the network isn't the primary concern, I am just saying that's what always seems to happen, even when they try their best to curtail it (This speed upgrade wasn't supposed to be going out to existing customers before the area was ready but eventually it did).

Re: Honesty from VM
 

Its much better recently thanks, they had the local cabinet spread all over the footpath a few weeks ago replacing the guts of it and a tech has been out to replace all my passive splitters with powered ones to balance the power levels a bit. More effin cables though.

BQM is still looking peaky.....

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/s...20-02-2016.png

and

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/s...21-02-2016.png

I'm getting 30Mb+ at peak times on an old PC with a four or five year old wifi dongle, usually that means wired is 100Mb + from the router.

Traceroute sorry about format..


# Host Sent Recvd Best Avg Worst
1 thinkbroadband-gw2.core-rs2.thdo.ncuk.net 15 15 0ms 2ms 9ms
2 te2-2-30.bdr-rt3.thdo.ncuk.net 15 15 0ms 0ms 1ms
3 te2-1-9.star10g.bdr-rt1.thn.ncuk.net 15 15 0ms 0ms 0ms
4 linx-gw1.router.ntli.net 15 15 0ms 1ms 1ms
10 bagu-core-2a-ae10-0.network.virginmedia.net 15 15 7ms 7ms 8ms
11 LPuteaux-657-1-282-34.w80-15.abo.wanadoo.fr 15 15 8ms 8ms 9ms
12 cpc89916-warr7-2-0-cust109.1-1.cable.virginm.net 15 15 15ms 18ms 22ms

Re: Honesty from VM
 

I think all bets are off with Wifi, but it sounds like it's mostly better. Another speed test from me:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2016/02/5.png

Graphs are still suspect:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/s...22-02-2016.png

and that red line was from when Virgin decided to push a firmware update (At peak times!).

Re: Honesty from VM
 

Am pretty happy with performance now. 105Mb with a four year old lappy on wifi that works and shows there is plenty of bandwidth for the streaming and Xbox's that goes on in our house.

Kids must be happy with Broadband, there have been no complaints about buffering, slow or laggy gaming for a week now. That's the best service quality metric you can get. Are the users happy :D

Re: Honesty from VM
 

I am also pleased it has been fixed, especially as they said May originally. I'd rather they set reasonable expectations and fix it early than promise Feb and it be late.

Re: Honesty from VM
 

Yeah, it could go something like.

" when Virgin Media are having network issues, they can still provide speeds as fast or faster than our top line service, so switch to us."

It's a winner.