[MUD_Wizard]

While the General's advice is fair, it doesn't get you anywhere closer to diagnosing where your actual problems are.

There is a well known problem/bug with the Superhub 1 when running in router mode (the mode you're using), which causes the performance to get worse over time from its last reboot. This produces a ramping effect with increasing latency over time, which also affects the stability of the hubs cable, ethernet and wifi connections.

See message 5 here: http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/...y/td-p/2834249

First thing to do is to setup a BQM graph here to diagnose your latency issues: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping

Post a link to the shared graph, so we can have a look. You can do this from any computer on the network and takes two minutes to do. You will need to enable the Wan Ping Respond option in the advanced settings -> ping section of the Superhub settings.

Do this first, before rebooting the Superhub, so we can see if it makes a difference. Diagnosis is better than guessing.


Second, your powerline should be fine for gaming once setup properly. Not quite as good as an ethernet cable but should provide stable low latency, assuming your electrical house wiring is ok and its not going through a circuit breaker. You should test this seperately by pinging the Superhub on 192.168.0.1 from your computer, to see how good/bad the latency between your computer and Superhub is.

Powerline's do have limited speed though, so bear that in mind when doing speed tests. Shouldn't affect your gaming though as that's mostly about stable latency. Not all 500Mb powerline's performance are the same. Some have 100Mb ethernet ports which reduces the throughput speed you see to between 30-70Mb.

You mentioned wifi several times, as if you have additional wifi adapters separate to what the Superhub provides. Whatever you do, don't use your powerline with an additional wifi adapter. Wifi will produce much more interference and higher latency in general than powerline.

Message 40 here details why there are often problems with logging in to the Superhub admin interface and what you can do about it: http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/...2850588#M74902

Usually the admin interface may be busy or if permanently inaccessible it may have crashed.


So yes, there are good reasons for upgrading your Supehub to avoid these problems.

Third, as you've been upgraded from 30Mb to 100Mb at a time when many people have also been upgraded to 200Mb, your channels will have likely changed and your area may be experiencing some utilisation problems on those channels during peak time (too many people and not enough bandwidth to go around). This may also be causing a few latency spikes at peak time. This is an all too common complaint at the moment. Though probably not bad enough for VM to declare a problem.

However, rather than guessing what the problem is, we should approach this methodically and investigate before shelling out money.

Try to reduce the number of variables in the formula for testing.

The one thing you can be sure of is that running a Superhub 1 in router mode is setting yourself up for grief. Both from a wired and wifi standpoint, even moreso if you have utilisation issues.

You might also want to post your downstream, upstream and network log from your Superhub found here: 192.168.0.1/RouterStatus.html