Virgin media.

miceormen

miceormen

miceormen

Associate
Joined
26 Feb 2008
Posts
437
Not too much to say really.

Got 50 mb service back in August, all bloody wonderful, was getting on a real world basis 3-4mbps down and 1-1.5mbps up. September it all goes to shizzle. I live in quite a built up studenty area, so fair cop, its gonna slow down, but not this much. Performance dropped then to 200kbps down, 50kbps up, if i was very lucky. Initially thought it was the router / modem, but had a few 'engineers' out and was told all was copacetic.

Finally had had enough a week ago, so rang up and demanded they reinstall the setup along with a new router (a D-Link 615 this time to replace the awful Netgear n2000). For 2 days it worked absolutely flawlessly. Original speeds were back up, for instance I downloaded Win 7 in about 40 minutes from the Digi River server (Ultimate steal), and finally me and one of my housemates could play l4d / l4d2 with decent latencies.

Then one day ago the latencies went to shizzle again. Ping was averaging at 65, spiking all the way to 130-40.

Tonight the bandwidth has gone. Its just disappeared. Did a spread of download tests and average down was about 90kbps, up just stuttered and stuttered until we got to a reasonably declarable average of 20kbps.

Anything I can do?
 
From my experiance of VM it is fine for gaming (30 ms off 10MB here) as long as you don't touch torrents. If you even start up Utorrent for a few minutes before about 1am the traffic management kicks in, slowing the entire connection to a stall. Alos note that if you start up downloading/uploading during the day your speeds can be capped for a fair amount of time/ 5 hours I think from my last check.

The only way around this is switch ISP's or just download at night unfortunatly.
 
Forgive me cramping the experts, but there's a cap on the 50meg lines? Are you sure someone isn't sneaking onto your wifi?
 
There didnt use to be traffic management, I was told about it by a friend who worked for telewest (now virgin) - came in a few months back, after they launched 50meg in greater london.

And no, the wifi is secure. WPA2 and my pass word is 12 characters / numbers long.
 
Ok time to see if we can sort this out for you mate

Just got 50 meg myself and torrenting my favourite anime of the net, which afaik is not piracy as they have been aired therefore its just like saving it from the tele to watch over and over

Speed test gives me 44-49Megabit/s donwload and about 1.5 upload

When I do torrent I get high HIGH dl compared to what I had on BT ADSL

Using said Dlink 615 and have no problems though I am using ethernet my twin also shares over a mimo USB adaptor and also gets high torrent speeds

Have done direct downloads and get stupid high speeds (new CCC is 60mb, got it in about 12 seconds, 4.8mb DL is amazing

Have not played many online games to test my ping

So first things to check would be to go into your wireless router, make sure you have only got those you know connected. Then reboot the modem and the router by unplugging for 30 seconds and plug in router then the modem, turn on PC shut all programs down that are not needed then run some tests.

There is the traffic management system table on their site and shows that 50Mb XXL does NOT get managed unless you go over their FUP/AUP (Fair/Acceptable usage ploicy) kind of like an ISP's ambiguous term for "we can throttle you without needing to give exact figures

If you suspect you are being managed then call virign but don't mention torrents, no ISP is fond of these as they suck ALL bandwidth, no matter what speed you DL at.

If you are not being managed and the router/modem is reset and no one else is on your connection then call virgin to find out about a fault on the line or ask for an engineer to come over and have a look. Continue to test at various times of day, the management period is only up to 5 hours on all packages yet this would not apply to a FUP infraction, I have not encountered one of these on virgin though i have only had it for 3 days now

TLDR:
1: Reset router+pc+modem
2: Check who is connected
3: Perform tests
4: Call virgin for more information
5: Post results here for more help

Good luck!
 
David-Stephens said:
Just got 50 meg myself and torrenting my favourite anime of the net, which afaik is not piracy as they have been aired therefore its just like saving it from the tele to watch over and over
Click to expand...

It is piracy as it is copyrighted content that has not been given permission by the copyright holders to be distributed in such a manner, as such you are infringing on the copyright and are breaking the law. When you record a program as it is being broadcast, or using BBC iPlayer, the programs have been licensed to be distributed in that way.

Personaly I recommend using virgin medias usenet tech support newsgroup if you cant figure out the problem yourself. That way you skip any middle man on the phone who tells you to turn it off and on again and deal with real tech support people. Also with it being usenet, the tech support guys can instantly see your IP and so provide remote diagnostic support on your modem. They helped me a lot when I had compleatly random disconects and periods of no connection, because their remote diagnostics didn't match with my modems reported logs, they determined someone had cloned my modem (and it was the clone that was being diagnosed, not mine) so they solved the problem with a new modem.
 
Last edited:
As above, I just got the 50Mb a week ago and my downstream has always been above 30Mb/s minimum, and that's with a local fault still being sorted out and with thousands of students living in my area. They're usually really helpful, so I can only suggest checking out your hardware a bit more thoroughly and continue ringing them up. Send in a trace route with their online application form and see if that gets anywhere.
 
From an old post of mine -

If you have any issues with virgin you should post in the support forums as mentioned and give them as much detail as possible, ie description of the problem, traceroutes to bbc.co.uk, modem status pages etc and they will have a look at it for you, I had an issue a few weeks ago, posted on the support forums and it was fixed in 2 days.

I used the free version of pingplotter for the traceroutes - http://www.pingplotter.com/freeware.html

Modem status page - http://192.168.100.1/ username/pass usually root/root

Setting up newsgroups -

http://www.virginmedia.com/help/cable/newsgroups/setting-up.php

Group to post in -

virginmedia.support.broadband.cable.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom