50M : Think Broadband Ping Monitor Results (POST YOURS)

[spiderplant]

Originally Posted by SnoopZ

Loads of people are having this issue with Area 31 on the VM forums, it pisses me off they can't monitor issues like this.

"Area 31" is the billng system you are on, and it covers many regions (as far apart as Cambridge, Swindon and Stafford). It isn't related to any broadband fault that you may have.

[SnoopZ]

Originally Posted by adz161

Hi SnoopZ ,

I am in Area 31 , Pineham,Northampton. Just ran a Speedtest on that server and get 180mb but full speed on other servers such as Maidenhead. I am on M500.

We have been going through a reseg in Northampton as they appear to have changed the headend and the internet has been awful since early feb. So many people have kicked off now though they must have sped things along as I now get full speeds 24/7. BQM seems to show a lot of noise during peak hours at the moment but no real impact to speeds 540mb down . 37mb up .

I seem to have a hop now on trace routes to anything external with a internal IP address(10.144.20.1)so not sure if they have put in a temp link whilst the headend work is ongoing (I believe they are moving it to a new building)

After lots of people kicking off last night on the VM forums I am hoping someone will look into it.

---------- Post added at 09:06 ---------- Previous post was at 09:04 ----------

Originally Posted by spiderplant

"Area 31" is the billng system you are on, and it covers many regions (as far apart as Cambridge, Swindon and Stafford). It isn't related to any broadband fault that you may have.

Ok thanks for that, the fault is affecting people in Newmarket Cambridge and some surroundings villages going on the threads on VM.

[pip08456]

All quiet here.

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by SnoopZ

[/COLOR]Loads of people are having this issue with Area 31 on the VM forums, it pisses me off they can't monitor issues like this.

The fastest way to get VM to identify an issue is to call them and report it. Posting about it on the forum doesn't do much.

Virgin actually has a plethora of monitoring systems with various alarms and such, but the one they'll rely on to dictate how severe an issue is and what to prioritise is the number of calls logged in a given area. They have a system that knows which nodes different customers are connected to and which areas those nodes are in. You got a fault? If 3 of your neighbours also report a fault, an engineer will be sent out sharpish as that means your node is probably faulty and affecting plenty more. But if you don't report it and it's only showing 2 customers down, it's probably not getting fixed until the engineer visits one of them (and that'll probably be days away, depending on availability of both the engineer and the customer).

Even if you phone up and get told "Yeah there's a fault in the area, we know about it", the fact that you made the call at all gets taken into consideration when they're deciding where to send an Engineer next. If that call turns out to be the 10th or 20th in a cluster of nodes, it'll probably flag it as a wider area problem and bump it up in priority.

But the reverse is also true. A hundred people could report a fault within a city, but if they're spread around a hundred different nodes and the city has a few hundred thousand customers, 100 isn't going to register on anyone's radar. That's why you *have* to call up and report it.

At the end of the day, nobody at Virgin is going to lose sleep if your internet is down and you've not reported it. You're still going to pay your bill and you're costing Virgin nothing by sitting there getting annoyed.

But when people start calling up, that's when refunds start getting issued, that's when call centre staff are needed, that's when it starts costing Virgin Money and it's really simple - the more money it's costing them, the faster they'll get it fixed.

[SnoopZ]

Originally Posted by Kushan

The fastest way to get VM to identify an issue is to call them and report it. Posting about it on the forum doesn't do much.

Virgin actually has a plethora of monitoring systems with various alarms and such, but the one they'll rely on to dictate how severe an issue is and what to prioritise is the number of calls logged in a given area. They have a system that knows which nodes different customers are connected to and which areas those nodes are in. You got a fault? If 3 of your neighbours also report a fault, an engineer will be sent out sharpish as that means your node is probably faulty and affecting plenty more. But if you don't report it and it's only showing 2 customers down, it's probably not getting fixed until the engineer visits one of them (and that'll probably be days away, depending on availability of both the engineer and the customer).

Even if you phone up and get told "Yeah there's a fault in the area, we know about it", the fact that you made the call at all gets taken into consideration when they're deciding where to send an Engineer next. If that call turns out to be the 10th or 20th in a cluster of nodes, it'll probably flag it as a wider area problem and bump it up in priority.

But the reverse is also true. A hundred people could report a fault within a city, but if they're spread around a hundred different nodes and the city has a few hundred thousand customers, 100 isn't going to register on anyone's radar. That's why you *have* to call up and report it.

At the end of the day, nobody at Virgin is going to lose sleep if your internet is down and you've not reported it. You're still going to pay your bill and you're costing Virgin nothing by sitting there getting annoyed.

But when people start calling up, that's when refunds start getting issued, that's when call centre staff are needed, that's when it starts costing Virgin Money and it's really simple - the more money it's costing them, the faster they'll get it fixed.

Well me and phones don't get on, so i will let the others do that and the ones who have done that are being booked engineer visits even after telling them it isn't a local issue.

Connection is running normal right now but it around 30mins it will start to go pear shaped, if it doesn't then it'll be the first time in several days, atleast the moderators seem to have got the message now after last nights moaning from several users, all from the surrounding towns and villages around Cambridge.

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by SnoopZ

Well me and phones don't get on, so i will let the others do that and the ones who have done that are being booked engineer visits even after telling them it isn't a local issue.

Yeah, what's meant to happen is the first line guy books an engineer visit and when the system sees a bunch booked in for a similar area, it cancels them and an outage is raised.

By "the system", I mean some poor underpaid (and probably offshore) worker who has to do it all manually, including copying and pasting telephone numbers to send out the "Your tech has been cancelled" message.

[SnoopZ]

Well we were told today on the VM site that networks found a capacity issue on the network and expect a vast improvement this evening.

So far the issue hasn't shown itself for me at the usual 4pm time so i hope it is fixed.

[Taf]

No internet for around an hour. Half of that was spent waiting for VM to answer the phone, then do tests. He ended by saying he would get a new modem sent out. 5 seconds later the internet returned. DOH!!!

It went off again later, and resetting it caused the main RCD to trip. And again a couple of hours later.

(P.S. the missus is suffering a period of insomnia, so is up on the net most nights)

[Taf]

It all went to pot at midnight last night.

[Taf]

And again, this time after upgrading to a Hub3. The helpline is not helpful, it just says "Engineers are working on it in your area (Cardiff CF14), call back in 30 minutes".

[Taf]

It looks like they are up to something during the night

[Martin_D]

Looks like people working from home is starting to hit our line from 8-2pm

Stay safe all we will get through this together.

[Taf]

100% dead for a couple of days until a few minutes ago.

Back just in time not to trigger automatic compo.

[Martin_D]

Speed is getting worse

[Arthurgray50@blu]

Can someone please explain why the Internet is so slow in TW area.

We are paying top dollar for the thing, and its far too slow