Terrible speeds, Virgin won't do anything about it. Any suggestions?

[General Maximus]

I wouldnt hold your breath, you can pretty much guarantee you'll be waiting a year for them to do anything about it.

[Joxer]

If it has a reference no. there should be an estimated fix time, post the reference and somebody can look it up.

[qasdfdsaq]

They gave me F000883601 but said there's no ETA as it's still being investigated and it requires a capacity upgrade. I'm hoping maybe the 50mbit rollout will introduce some extra capacity, it seems to me that the UBR is overloaded rather than the backhaul, the extra DS2.0/a channels might help...

Anyhow at least now I don't have to worry about getting STM'd, since it doesn't actually make my connection any slower when it kicks in

[hokkers999]

Originally Posted by Magilla

I'm in the same boat, speed is consistantly below 512Kb every night with massive packet loss, often below 250Kbs. Has been like this for over 4 months. UBR massively oversubscribed, "the worst I've ever seen" according to the tech from the newsgroups, closely followed by "the upgrade work was not done, cancelled twice, it's not looking good".

That is the sum total of information given by VM. No response to any posts asking why "it's not looking good".

In my experience all emails are simply ignored, I've yet to recieve any response that bears any resemblance to the issues originally highlighted. Phone support is a none starter, they simply refuse to do anything other than put you through to the tech, who then says there's nothing they can do. You just end up going in circles.

Sent a recorded letter of complaint last month (after 3 months of phone and emails), no response as yet (2 days to go), then it's onto the 3rd party complaints proceedure and then Ofcom.

Beyond resorting to the courts there seems little else that the end customer can do.

You can hit them in the pocket and do what I did, downgrade to the 2meg service.

[Noggo]

Hope you're speaking to customer services, now they're admitted your problem with download speed is due to lack of capacity. No point paying full price for a taff connection.

[Magilla]

Originally Posted by hokkers999

You can hit them in the pocket and do what I did, downgrade to the 2meg service.

I would but it's just letting them off the hook. I decided I'd go through the official complaints proceedure to see if I can get it resolved, or force a statement that they are unable to resolve the problem within a reasonable timescale.

[yorkshireborn]

Originally Posted by Magilla

I would but it's just letting them off the hook. I decided I'd go through the official complaints proceedure to see if I can get it resolved, or force a statement that they are unable to resolve the problem within a reasonable timescale.

as said above downgrade to 2 meg the only other thing is if u need to download then do it in the the early hours of the morning.

[Magilla]

Originally Posted by yorkshireborn

as said above downgrade to 2 meg the only other thing is if u need to download then do it in the the early hours of the morning.

Downgrading to 2Mb will mean that I am not recieving considerably less than the tarrif below mine, and as such I would have no grounds for complaint.

As someone who would like more than the 2M package, how does downgrading help in anyway?

[hokkers999]

Originally Posted by Magilla

Downgrading to 2Mb will mean that I am not recieving considerably less than the tarrif below mine, and as such I would have no grounds for complaint.

As someone who would like more than the 2M package, how does downgrading help in anyway?

It doesn't help you get more than 2 meg, but it does mean that you aren't paying for something you can't get.

What it does do is take £19/month out of VM's coffers. If *everyone* cut back to 2 meg they'd sure as hell notice that drop in income, perhaps then they might make the damn network "work"

[Stabhappy]

Or assume that britain doesn't want/need faster internet and offer worse products for more.

[qasdfdsaq]

OK, no idea what happened but as of tonight I'm actually getting broadband again, as opposed to speeds and pings considerably slower than my mobile phone. This is despite my modem power levels going even further out of spec (14.6dB Recieve level)...

Ping statistics for 64.233.183.104:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 100, Lost = 0 (0% loss)
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 31ms, Maximum = 67ms, Average = 38ms



Four weeks since I reported it, but coincidentally also two days after I mentioned moving to a rival ISP on the newsgroups... Didn't expect network engineers to be working Saturdays night but either way, lets hope it sticks...

*Braces self for depressing return to 150kbps tomorrow evening*

[Noggo]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

Ping statistics for 64.233.183.104:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 100, Lost = 0 (0% loss)
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 31ms, Maximum = 67ms, Average = 38ms

You can tell something isn't still quite right by the above. I use to get erratic results like those when I use having issues with oversubscription and now without any issues:

E:\Documents and Settings\Bob>ping 64.233.183.104 -n 20

Pinging 64.233.183.104 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=29ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=29ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=29ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=242
Reply from 64.233.183.104: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=242

Ping statistics for 64.233.183.104:
    Packets: Sent = 20, Received = 20, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 27ms, Maximum = 33ms, Average = 29ms

Glad to see your speed is max though, fingers crossed for it stoping that way too. Quick you better touch some wood .

[Smythcolan]

Don't know if this may help anyone but ive only been with virgin for 2 weeks and on Friday my speed suddenly dropped to around 200 - 500k all day.
Contacted them on Saturday as it was still the same and a very helpfull chap guided me through a few checks.
To cut a long story short he told me to ping the BBC web site through Dos and this came back at 13ms which was good but through IE and Firefox using the speedtest site my Ping was 150-200ms.
It turned out in the end to be Virgins own PC Guard that was causing the problem. After uninstalling this i have not had a problem and speeds are back up to 9 - 10mb and ping is now 55ms.

So if anyone is having problems and has PC Guard installed try uninstalling it.

Hope this may help someone.

[qasdfdsaq]

Ah well, back to the usual crap today:



Must have been everyone out last night or something.

[graf_von_anonym]

The issue would appear to be oversubscription but all is not lost. As Virgin roll out 50mb services across the network they are increasing (or parallelling) capacity, which should do something to alleviate these sorts of issues. It's allegedly due to finish before the end of 'Summer', but from the depths of winter that may look quite far off.

While the Complaints procedure is probably the right route to go down, they'll probably only be able to offer you credit (continuing or otherwise) on the account. While it's possible that a network upgrade could get bumped up the priority list, the 50mb deployment is so significant that it's unlikely they'll be doing much more than contemplating work not already scheduled while it is ongoing. 50mb should do

Then, of course, they'll activate the Packet/Application/Routing-Analysis Network Operation Inhibiting Apparatus to arbitrarily disconnect you for watching Little Howard's Big Question on iPlayer or downloading a legitimately purchased musical file.