Gaming problems on Virgin (2MB)

fish99 · 19 Jul 2008 at 23:16

Hi,

Just wondering if this is a common problem. I've been getting disconnected from servers in 2 racing sims I play - rFactor and iRacing, and we've also got a WoW player in the house who reports disconnections too.

It started when they began rolling out the speed upgrades early this year, even though the local exchange (doncaster) has not been upgraded yet.

My PC is connected wired to the router and I have that ethernet port on the router set to highest priority.

Basically I just want to know if other people on Virgin are still finding it fine for online gaming.

Cheers,
Simon.

kmufc77 · 19 Jul 2008 at 23:45

im on VM 20mb broadband and i have the same problem,VM have rubbish pings thats why you are getting disconnected all the time from game servers,not sure what to recommend im sure someone here will help you on this. ive always found the cable forum very useful when having problems with VM

fish99 · 19 Jul 2008 at 23:54

Thanks. I should say it's an intermittent thing, most of the time pings look normal and everything is running smoothly, then suddenly you're disconnected. We did have some periods a few weeks ago when all pings went up to about 300 for a few days but that was a specific yorkshire-wide VM issue which they've fixed now.

Cable forum = this forum?

kmufc77 · 19 Jul 2008 at 23:56

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=cable+forum&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

ever since i went with VM my pings have been awful for gamming never had it on any other ISP, i simply put it down to over subscription

fish99 · 20 Jul 2008 at 01:22

Thanks, I'll post there about the problem

geekyEd · 20 Jul 2008 at 01:25

Is this VM ADSL or VM cable?

fish99 · 20 Jul 2008 at 02:26

Cable.

DarkMatter · 20 Jul 2008 at 07:03

hmmmm thats strange, well i am on virgin 20mb, and during the day its fine but during the evening it becomes almost unusable for anything other than web browsing. I found out that if you use 4gb ( cant remmeber the exact figure but its not much ) of bandwidth during the day they pretty much throw you down to 512kb connection :O.

Daegan · 20 Jul 2008 at 10:27

DarkMatter said:
hmmmm thats strange, well i am on virgin 20mb, and during the day its fine but during the evening it becomes almost unusable for anything other than web browsing. I found out that if you use 4gb ( cant remmeber the exact figure but its not much ) of bandwidth during the day they pretty much throw you down to 512kb connection :O.

That's not traffic management, that's oversubscription - too many people in your area sharing too little bandwidth - which in itself would probably account for crap pings and poor speeds. If you hit the traffic management limits on a 20mb connection you get throttled down to 5mb, not 512kb, more than enough bandwidth for gaming.

Senture · 20 Jul 2008 at 10:33

I'm also plauged with this curse. Using VM's 2MB service in harrow myself. I get constant packet loss and in the evenings, my ping shoots up to 400-1500 in games

DarkMatter · 20 Jul 2008 at 10:35

Daegan said:
That's not traffic management, that's oversubscription - too many people in your area sharing too little bandwidth - which in itself would probably account for crap pings and poor speeds. If you hit the traffic management limits on a 20mb connection you get throttled down to 5mb, not 512kb, more than enough bandwidth for gaming.

sorry i knew it was 5 something! must be far too many people using virgin these days :S supprising as i didn have the problem 8months ago.

Camalot · 20 Jul 2008 at 14:55

I dont get cut out much recently, but i'm very slow and laggy in games since going from pipex to VM.

Sasso · 20 Jul 2008 at 17:11

yea i used to have a 2mb con with VM in mny student house and well for downlaoding it was right on the money.. apart from when the throttling would kick in about 400mb early

but then in games it would be fine most of the time like pings low as 8 some times in CSS and liek 25-40 in BF2 but every now and then it would rocked to 400 or so and then come back down to earth... very annoying to say the least. and towards the end of the uni year it was getting more frequent. think we are getting sky BB for the new house so bopefulyl be better

fish99 · 21 Jul 2008 at 03:09

This is all looking very bad. Maybe it'll improve when they upgrade the exchange, but it could just as likely get worse. Looks like it's time to try ADSL. I need a reliable service from 8-12 pm.

Thanks for the info

Minstadave · 21 Jul 2008 at 08:14

No problems with 2Mb cable here, its been rock solid for 2 years.

edscdk · 21 Jul 2008 at 16:35

I was on 2mb and upgraded to 20mb which was very very slow and crashed out downloading and playing games after a week I complained to virgin, they said the router they supplied me 2/3 years ago could not handle the upgraded speed... I downgraded the speed for 2 weeks which made it run much faster! - they they swapped the router for a new one and I upgraded back to 20mb and its fine! - may be of no relivence to your issue...

fish99 · 22 Jul 2008 at 14:27

Thanks for the info. Been using the same router and the same 2MB connection for a few years and the problems have only been in the last 3-4 months, so I don't think it can be put down to any of the hardware I have since nothing has changed.

I'll just have to see how it goes. Maybe it'll improve when they upgrade the exchange and if not I'll switch to ADSL.