Intermittent Virgin issues — torrenting causing it? Can a new router help?

[Ayahuasca]

You need to try and escalate it to someone who knows what they're doing. 2 "engineers" with no improvement or even an inkling as to what is causing it is **** poor.

I've done a week of heavy high seas sailing on VM and it hasn't made a difference to my TBB graph.

 

[dulcificum]

5m extra cable vs. having an amateur (no offence intended) reterminate it after shortening is not a tradeoff I'd consider to be worth making.

OP - give up torrenting for a week and see how you get on. I'm sure this is related to the amount of UDP traffic going through the Hub. Also do a pinhole reset of the Hub and leave it to reprovision.

None taken. And yeah that's my plan. There's almost no torrenting traffic though, certainly not comparable to those red lines in the BQM. Maybe 2-3 5GB files a week.

 

[dulcificum]

You need to try and escalate it to someone who knows what they're doing. 2 "engineers" with no improvement or even an inkling as to what is causing it is **** poor.

Any advice on this? I've spoken to both at length. The last one told me everything had been replaced apart from the cable between the cabinet and the property.

 

[dulcificum]

Further thinking that it's not due to the UDP is that that issue seems to mainly only happen when running in modem mode which I've still never done.

 

[Duke]

5m extra cable vs. having an amateur (no offence intended) reterminate it after shortening is not a tradeoff I'd consider to be worth making.

Yeah probably should have said to source a short length not do a DIY job on it.

OP - give up torrenting for a week and see how you get on. I'm sure this is related to the amount of UDP traffic going through the Hub. Also do a pinhole reset of the Hub and leave it to reprovision.

But this, even if you don't think its that just try it. You'd be surprised how many complain about VM on here and a fair few are caused by either their own kit (PC, laptop, some old AP from 2005, a Pi running a firewall or whatever). Ideally you need to run just 1 PC cabled in for a few days with nothing else connected and work backwards from there but I know that will be difficult.

 

[dulcificum]

But this, even if you don't think its that just try it. You'd be surprised how many complain about VM on here and a fair few are caused by either their own kit (PC, laptop, some old AP from 2005, a Pi running a firewall or whatever). Ideally you need to run just 1 PC cabled in for a few days with nothing else connected and work backwards from there but I know that will be difficult.

Presumably the BQM would filter out any issues with other equipment? We see big outages, latency spikes and lots of dropped packets overnight when nobody is using the connection (okay sure, maybe our two phones are getting some push notifications).

Overnight nothing else is on, we don't run a pihole or third-party AP/router. Nobody games or even streams a lot, no VoIP other than working hours. I have a linux box directly connected to the SH3 by 1GbE that runs speedtest-cli every hour and ping constantly and that's it which also sees the same issues.

 

[dulcificum]

I don't believe it. I turned of torrenting yesterday morning and this is what we have now:



Not amazing but I'd kill for that to be the normal situation.

What confuses me is that we are not heavy torrent users. No auto-snatching, no constant seeding/leeching. Like I said, just a handful of files a week absolute max which are left seeding for 48-72 hours at low speeds.

I was hoping that if torrenting was the culprit then buying a Edgerouter X + UniFi AC LR AP would be the solution but it appears not.

It's looking like it might be this:

Does this describe the issue

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Speed/UDP-issues-on-SuperHub3-collective-thread/td-p/4382720

Even though we don't use modem mode and don't use much UDP traffic. In which case is Virgin actually going to be useable for us at all?

 

[Duke]

How many connections do you have it set to use? Try another port?

 

[dulcificum]

16 connections.
Have tried other ports but not really sure why that would make any difference.

 

[Caged]

Have you tried putting the torrents inside a VPN tunnel that uses TCP?

 

[dulcificum]

Have you tried putting the torrents inside a VPN tunnel that uses TCP?

Not yet. Sounds like the next step is shelling out for a VPN.

 

[Christopher Highcock]

I've been having problems with using a vpn and torrents on the hub 3.Was thinking of putting it in modem mode and buying a decent router to attach to it as a way of bypassing the massive throttling im getting. Will this work or am I wasting my money. Was thinking of getting the tplink archer ax50

 

[dulcificum]

I've been having problems with using a vpn and torrents on the hub 3.Was thinking of putting it in modem mode and buying a decent router to attach to it as a way of bypassing the massive throttling im getting. Will this work or am I wasting my money. Was thinking of getting the tplink archer ax50

This was my plan too but I'm holding back for now due to the issues with the Intel Puma chip. Please do report back if it makes any difference though.

 

[mid_gen]

I don't believe it. I turned of torrenting yesterday morning and this is what we have now:



Not amazing but I'd kill for that to be the normal situation.

What confuses me is that we are not heavy torrent users. No auto-snatching, no constant seeding/leeching. Like I said, just a handful of files a week absolute max which are left seeding for 48-72 hours at low speeds.

Torrents aren't 'just' quiet little downloads that sit there inconspicuously trickling data up and down. They open shedloads of connections up and down and are well known for bringing cheapo routers to their knees. They just aren't very useful these days when you can just download stuff straight off a CDN at max speed with a single connection.

Why not just use a different means to obtain the files you're after?

 

[dulcificum]

Torrents aren't 'just' quiet little downloads that sit there inconspicuously trickling data up and down. They open shedloads of connections up and down and are well known for bringing cheapo routers to their knees. They just aren't very useful these days when you can just download stuff straight off a CDN at max speed with a single connection.

Why not just use a different means to obtain the files you're after?

Because there aren't any for lots of them. I've already said I'd happily buy new kit if I knew that were the issue and not the connection itself or the Puma chip. It's the troubleshooting that's the issue.

I've had 1000s of running torrents and 100s of active files at a time on Virgin connections with no issue before so I'm not understanding why the same router hardware can't handle it now.

 

[neodude]

I find a decent replacement router solved nearly all of VM issues. I torrent and download from Newsgroups constantly (it's automated), and my whole household still gets perfect gaming pings and video streaming. This is mostly thanks to using FQ_CODEL which is just really good at sharing bandwidth fairly between multiple users. I use PfSense and Unifi APs.

 

[MikeTimbers]

I've switched my SH3 into modem mode and added a Tenda AC2100 after endless dropouts of the wifi with the SH3.

Is it better? Arguable TBH. The wifi is better but my upload speeds are horrific in the last couple of days for no apparent reason.

 

[Avalon]

If the underlying issue is the UDP packet bug, no amount of QoS or router swapping will alter that. Run a TCP based VPN tunnel and route traffic over that to see if it makes a difference. If it does you just saved yourself the cost/agro of a new router.