[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by Travelstar

Recently have moved across to VM from BT and purchased the Vivid 200 service.

Whilst the overall service seems pretty decent and in fact I have even received over 300 Mbit/sec on some days. Unfortunately last night my speed (wired) seemed to drop to around 13-15 Mbits/sec which is a significant and unexpected decrease). In addition to this my experience with the SuperHub 3 has been pretty poor.

Port 4 which happens to also be the only port which works when the unit is in modem mode seems flaky. Sometimes it decides it just wants to be a 100 Mbit/sec port rather than gigabit. I've tried other cables just to check and i've been able to replicate the issue but it can run a day without dropping down to a slower speed.

In addition to the above, the Virgin Hub UI must be the slowest I have ever used. Pages take literally 30 seconds+ to load which seems more than a little extreme. I really can't see how this got out of UAT with that performance. Wifi range also seems fairly poor and my Home Hub was significantly better so I am taking the plunge and getting an R8000 to take over those duties. That said, I need to get the SuperHub fixed so that port 4 does not decide to drop to the lower speed.

Questions:

1. Have other people found the UI of the SuperHub 3 to be as poor as me where pages literally take 30 seconds (sometimes more) to load? I've read on this forum that the hub is slow, but I was not expecting it to be as bad as this.
[SEPH]: Which firmware are you on? It's shown in the Info subsection of the ADMIN section. Until yesterday I was on the 85J firmware and it wasn't as slow as you describe.

2. Have others noticed that the propagation performance of the SH3 wifi is poor? Two walls seems enough to pretty much kill the signal.
[SEPH]: Two walls can kill any WiFi signal. I've found it to be OK - as good as the SH2ac (which is acknowledged as fine). That said, on principle I am in modem mode with an external router that has external antennae and many more router functions that the hubs have got.

3. Anyone else noticed port 4 (i.e. the master port) so be flaky? Or has I just ended up with a dodgy router?
[SEPH]: Dodgy router perhaps. Go onto the VM forum and tell your story about Port 4. Within two or three days the VM Forum Team will arrange a technician to come and sort that out.
4. Does the performance of VM really vary as much as 13-320 Mbits/sec? The dramatic slow down last night (admittedly during 'peak time') was unexpected - personally I would have expected I would have obtained at least 50 Mbit/sec.
[SEPH]: Depends on what him next door's six children are doing with their streaming and mega-downloading, etc. It could also have been some temporary blip and you may care to post your downstream and upstream router stats for an opinion.

As a side note I find the overall 'advanced options' within the SH3 pretty poor. It might be good enough for basic users, but for anyone who has even slightly more requirements, you really are hamstrung by what the SH3 offers.
[SEPH]: Yep - as with all the broadband suppliers' gateway devices. Hence modem mode.