[FNi]

Well, the engineer just left.

After I explained what the problem was and showed him the logs, he replied with an honest (but disappointing) answer stating that he's very new to VM 50Mb modems and doesn't really know anything about T3 or T4 connections. I got the impression that the only thing he knew how to troubleshoot was power levels.

As you rightly guessed, he then put a 6db forward path attenuator on the back of my modem (because my downstream was "f**king high" - his words) but mentioned that he wasn't completely happy doing so because my upstream is apparently great - so any attenuator could possibly negatively effect it.

He also left a 3db attenuator here and said I should use it to replace the 6db one if it does more harm than good.

I was also given the "your internet connection looks fine so there's really nothing to fix" line and was told to continue monitoring for lag spikes and disconnects - if they continue to happen I should phone him and he'll send out someone who knows a bit more about T3 and T4...

So the question is, why on earth does Virgin Media send out engineers who don't understand their own product?

So far I haven't used anything which would flag packetloss/lagspikes (Skype, Xbox Live etc), but I have noticed that my connection speed has dropped from around 49Mb to 41Mb which is "nice"....