Not Convinced About Support Recieved - Opinions?

DampCat

DampCat

DampCat

Soldato
Joined
26 Feb 2007
Posts
14,177
Location
Leafy Cheshire
Lo

First, i apologise for my confusion between mb and mbits or whatever.

So I upgraded my mum's cable from 20mb to 60mb for her, but it's been running at 8mb speeds for the last few months. I'm maxing out the connection on Usenet at 1.2mb/sec, and cant seem to bust that any time of day using any kind of process.

I called up to have a little moan, and they didnt believe my claims so did a remote tech support speedtest to their own speedtest servers, and it also confirmed "an 8mb connection".

So they passed it to "second line" tech support, and they suggested running tracerts to "nividia.co.uk" and "bbc.co.uk", and all the steps to virgin servers were responding in 12ms, and then it jumped to 200+ ish when outside the virgin network.

Now, is it just me, or is that not the same as download speed? My ping is always super low. That's not really the issue. They fobbed me off with the line "The problem is that the rest of the internet in your area is congested".

I'm not convinced. Can someone confirm?
 
Is it Virgin Cable?

If so then you should basically always get the 60Mb (unless you overuse the connection during the monitored times in which case you will get limited I believe - not certain this is active on the 60Mb service) or at least that seems to be the consensus

The 1.2MB/s you get on usenet would equate to 9.6Mb/s, which is obviously more than the 8Mb/s connection speed you think its running at.

Just to confirm

Mb or Mbit = Megabits - this is the format your speed is advertised at by the ISP.
MB or Mbyte = Megabytes - each megabyte is 8 megabits and is the format your speed is shown in when tranferring files between hard drives or when downloading from say usenet.

So when you get 1.2MB/s on Usenet you multiply this by 9 to get how many Mb/s this is - ie 9.6Mb/s

And yes the ping test they performed was basically pointless as this will never (disclaimer in place as I suppose technically it could but its unlikely) cause a 60Mb connection to run at about 8-10Mb.
 
1. A ping test is in no way a bandwidth test. Dropped packets could indiate problems on the line that could cause low throughput but that is as far as you could make a link, a tedious one at that.

2. If there was any worth from a ping test in a bandwidth problem scenario using 3rd party servers who more than likely down class ICMP packets is absolutely ridiculous.
 
How old is the modem? My old old virgin media modem supported upto 50mbp/s connection from their side, but connecting to my router it only had a 10mbp/s interface!! Got it upgraded and all was well.

What router is it running through? Or isn't it? If it isn't check the speed and duplex settings in the network card properties.
 
It's a new Superhub modem from 2 months ago.

The machine they tested was wired. I get the same download speed from wireless devices.
 
It's a no brainer really.

Call back, kick up a fuss, tell them that a ping test is not indicative of current network contention/your lines ability to pull it's stated speeds and that despite the time of day you are unable to get anywhere near the quoted download speeds.

Keep getting your issue escalated until you speak to someone who knows what they are on about.
 
Smashing. I thought so. I didnt argue on that call since i'd been on there an hour and i was hungry :/

Is it worth checking the router for port speeds or should i just assume it's capable of the 60mb as that's the router they gave me for it?

And is there anything i can do to definitely rule out my machine?
 
Drop by the Virgin Media support forums - you'll have to wait a few days for a reply but you're then straight through to second line who are a hell of a lot more useful than the normal phone customer services people.
 
Good idea. If no help i'll call them back and whinge.

I basically Copy Pasta'd people in this thread. Hope y'all dont mind.
 
If you still get nowhere just email [email protected] it will be passed to the ceo office team who actually get things done. I never bother with the normal phone support due to all the nonsense you get.
 
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