100M Slow Speeds and Jittery Ping in Manchester (M20)

Aekeron · 15-12-2011, 13:56

Hi there,

I've been on the 100mbit service since July. The first few months were great - decent speeds and reliable pings for gaming.

In the past week the service quality has nosedived massively. Download speeds range from 5MB-10MB per second (tested from multiple sources), but the real problems take the form of reduced upload speeds and lag in games.

My upload reaches perhaps 500KB/sec maximum when uploading large files via FTP to one of my sites (not hosted by VM - hosted on my own dedibox in a datacentre). This isn't terrible but I presume is a symptom of the issue that is causing the bad pings for gaming.

In regards to gaming, my ping 'jitter' according to speedtests is quite high (sadly I don't have the numbers with me as I'm in work) and my average ping is a fair chunk higher than previously (average of 40-50 rather than 20ish). The higher pings are annoying but the jitter is really making gaming impossible. This is especially pronounced in Battlefield 3 and Battlefield Bad Company 2, which have both become laggy, unplayable messes. Other games aren't great but aren't quite so heavily screwed up by the issues.

Currently the SuperHub is running in modem mode but it has been tested running in router mode (with the other router removed from the network and powered off) without any difference. It has also been tested on multiple PCs on the network so it isn't an issue tied to a particular PC hardware or software setup.

I have yet to test the connection outside of peak hours as I am in work at those times. I am also yet to test the SuperHub running in modem mode plugged in directly to a single PC. Hopefully I can perform at least the latter of these tests over the weekend.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Aekeron · 15-12-2011, 19:30

Definitely seems tied to peak use times. Quick game just before 6pm and no lag. As soon as it his 6.15 it became unplayable.

I've set up a ping monitor. Please ignore the earlier part of the day. The connection at home went down completely for some reason...

Aekeron · 16-12-2011, 11:38

Well, lots of replies so far but the instant drop to relatively usable pings/jitter at midnight seems like quite strong evidence that this is some kind of network traffic management screwing things up.

Surely someone that has seen lots of these and dealt with lots of VM stuff can point out what it is likely to be? I've seen things thrown around about upstream utilisation and the like, but I'd love to get the opinion of someone that has dealt with this sort of thing more.

WaxMan · 16-12-2011, 21:14

I wish my connection looked that good, this is last sundays 11th , on my 20M connection

And the 6th

I have noticed in the last few weeks that it is impossible to play any thing that has any reliance on ping Tribes ascend is futile bouncing around so much i cant even make it through doorways between 6pm and 10pm most nights.

I managed to disable my icmp response on my router earlier this week acidently hence no more recent graphs. I have not noticed my top dl speed dropping by to much however, i do wonder if this is some how connected to tivos and QOS for iplayer etc. delivery now that has gone from the old tv on demand to ip tv ondemand.

Aekeron · 22-12-2011, 11:34

Yes, my connection has improved somewhat, though it's still far from perfect.

Come the end of my contract I'll be moving to another ISP. Hopefully by that point Be's fibre offering will be available.

WaxMan · 23-12-2011, 00:50

mine finally went down completely Sunday night with a realy bad SNR, I was told an engineer was looking at it on monday and a temporary solution would be put in place nothing all of monday and that evening was told the issue would be fixed thursday. By wedensday after noon every thing was back and since then have had 25 - 33 ms pings peaking at 40, so what ever was done seems to have resolved the issue completely.

No idea what the actual cause was, the fact that they had an engineer out with out me having to book an apt was either due to this being fixed as part of other changes (ie what ever the issue that dropped me was up line and affecting more people) or VM are being very proactive and understand that loss of internet and bad performance is important to their customers. If it was not for the fact that I am very happy with VM's tv offering and the Tivo needing a VM phone line it would have been very likely that I would be getting infinity in by now with out letting them fix the outage.

Considering the stability of my connection and the speed that my outage was fixed (3days could have been a lot worse) i am going to see how it goes because when the cable is right i am very happy.