Virgin Media - a mini-rant

[THC_SsSsSnake]

they are complete idiots.i spent all saturday rying to get pay per view and they passed me from pillow to post ,and its still unresolved.

 

[Munky1080]

Yep, me too. BAM hopping as I like to call it. Get a ping program open (command prompt will do) and start pinging a nice UK server. Go into your router, disconnect, then reconnect. If your ping drops you're found a less overloaded BAM.

Sometimes at peak times I'll find my ping is 250ms until I connect to another BAM and it'll drop to 20ms. Same applies to net speed, you can get huge gains.

Yup - I will say however, that when I get on a different BAM my pings drop dramatically to about 20ms like you said.

 

[pendulum666]

I'd defninitely do some investigating on the issue before moving providers. You can change the attenuation < sp? on your line to tune it in to the line better and stuff I think? Theres some good forums for Virgin media not that I would want to direct traffic from here. But they have actual VM staff on them as well. I'd persist for a bit and see if it gets better.

 

[tolien]

You can't change the attenuation at all - it's a physical property of the line.

 

[THC_SsSsSnake]

i rang and complained about poor speeds and they checked modem connection and said there was a fault.engineer coming tuesday, hmm

 

[GingaNinja]

To update, I finally had a response to my e-mail, which was reasonably informative. It gives advice about problems at my end (equipment and cabling, etc.), but this is what it says about the VM network:

We are currently experiencing an uneven spread of traffic across different parts of the network, causing some customers to experience degradation in their broadband performance. This problem was also exacerbated by an unplanned outage, which has been resolved.

The traffic issue was identified on Friday and the fix will begin tomorrow. In conjunction with the broader improvements we are putting in place these should result in significantly improved service by the end of next week.

We'd like to apologise for the inconvenience this may have caused you. We are monitoring the situation closely on a daily basis and will post further updates at the end of the week if necessary. In some individual cases, customers using routers or the Virgin Wireless Kit may also benefit immediately from forcing a new session by switching your router off & on again at the wall socket.

We take our customer's experience seriously and are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.

In all, the CS has not been quite as bad as I was anticipating, but the broadband service remains poor.

Ginga

 

[mks2005]

To update, I finally had a response to my e-mail, which was reasonably informative. It gives advice about problems at my end (equipment and cabling, etc.), but this is what it says about the VM network:



In all, the CS has not been quite as bad as I was anticipating, but the broadband service remains poor.

Ginga

I've actually noticed a distinct improvement in the broadband recently - latency wise at least.

For the past few months pings would often be around 200ms (and this wasn't just at peak times. Recently I've noticed that I'm not experiencing pings anywhere as high as this - even at peak times. Although clearly evidence of overloaded infrastructure, the damage isn't as bad as 200ms, with the worst pings now being closer to 80ms. Which is a promising sign at least.

 

[GingaNinja]

I've actually noticed a distinct improvement in the broadband recently - latency wise at least.

For the past few months pings would often be around 200ms (and this wasn't just at peak times. Recently I've noticed that I'm not experiencing pings anywhere as high as this - even at peak times. Although clearly evidence of overloaded infrastructure, the damage isn't as bad as 200ms, with the worst pings now being closer to 80ms. Which is a promising sign at least.

That's good news. I'm keeping my eye on this page, but whatever happens I'll be keen to consider other ISPs once my contracts runs out.

Ginga