Virgin Broadband slight interruption every few minutes?

RussZS

RussZS

RussZS

Associate
Joined
23 Jan 2006
Posts
670
Hi, we have the Virgin Fibre 500mb package with Hub 4. I have a wired connection to my gaming PC. Every couple of minutes (but timing can vary) I will lose connection for a split second - I lose my discord chat briefly and MW2 will freeze slightly. I know it isn’t the PC as similar ‘stutters’ occur on an Xbox and PS4 when playing an online game. Video streaming is unaffected - it’s only evident when playing an online game.

Virgin haven’t been much help. They say they can’t see an issue and to try an aftermarket router. They won’t upgrade me to Hub5.

How do I begin to diagnose this issue please and fix it myself?

Any help appreciated.
 
Thanks both. Event Viewer is reporting an issue with power kernel but that’s from my PC turning itself off when loading DMZ in Warzone I think.

I’m running the continuous ping now and will see if it changes when the freezing occurs.

I’ve set up the think broadband BQM too to see what that can see.

My ping to Google.com is 16ms or so and TTL is 557. What would I expect to see if there’s a problem? I’ve got it running on a second monitor in the background
 
When Warzone freezes, the CMD displays ‘request timed out’ then continues pinging straight after. Ms measurement is still about 20 or so
 
RussZS said:
I’ve upgraded to 1gig with Hub 5 so will see if that fixes the issues. £8 a month more
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Really doubt that'll fix it, it's not like your maxing out your 500Mbps.
Unless the issue was related to the Hub 4 somehow.
 
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Broadband Quality Monitor is the answer. If it doesn't show packet loss then the problem isn't with the internet side, it's either your wifi or your PC's NIC / IP Stack crashing.
 
lmfy2k said:
is the gaming machine plugged directly into router?
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Yes via a 10m Ethernet cable. Other wireless devices and other wires show the same behaviour in online games so must be the router or incoming stream

I wanted 1gb line anyway so worth trying to see if Hub4 is the issue.

There’s a worrying amount of people on the VM forums with similar issues who never seem to find a way to resolve.

I left the ping running over a longer gaming session and it drops out exactly every 3 minutes

Are there any options on the Hub4 I could look to change please?
 
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RussZS said:
Yes via a 10m Ethernet cable. Other wireless devices and other wires show the same behaviour in online games so must be the router or incoming stream

I wanted 1gb line anyway so worth trying to see if Hub4 is the issue.

There’s a worrying amount of people on the VM forums with similar issues who never seem to find a way to resolve.

I left the ping running over a longer gaming session and it drops out exactly every 3 minutes

Are there any options on the Hub4 I could look to change please?
Click to expand...

report it to VM.

A similar thing happened to a friend and it was the external cable. It had become damaged and he was getting lots of frequent, short disconnects.

It's worth getting them to check everything over.
 
they’ve said it looks fine from their end and I’ll have to pay a fee if the engineer can’t find a fault. Surely if I can show easily that it’s a recurring fault every 3 minutes it’s enough for them to see there’s an issue? I have tried to post on the VM forum to get some traction that way but my activation email isn’t coming through.

I’ll try calling them again to suggest it could be the outside cable.

Worst thing is I upgraded to a 4090 from a 3080 as I thought the stuttering was my GPU
 
RussZS said:
they’ve said it looks fine from their end and I’ll have to pay a fee if the engineer can’t find a fault. Surely if I can show easily that it’s a recurring fault every 3 minutes it’s enough for them to see there’s an issue? I have tried to post on the VM forum to get some traction that way but my activation email isn’t coming through.

I’ll try calling them again to suggest it could be the outside cable.

Worst thing is I upgraded to a 4090 from a 3080 as I thought the stuttering was my GPU
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As @Moley says above, set up a quality monitor on Thinkbroadband and let it run for a day or more. If the problem is your connection (or the hub), you should see the outages as red packet loss on the graph.

If so then you can offer that to VM as proof. Easiest to post on their community forum with a link to the graph than trying to explain to a droid on the phone.

If the quality monitor shows no issues then it's something "your side" of the hub.
 
Vertigo1 said:
As @Moley says above, set up a quality monitor on Thinkbroadband and let it run for a day or more. If the problem is your connection (or the hub), you should see the outages as red packet loss on the graph.

If so then you can offer that to VM as proof. Easiest to post on their community forum with a link to the graph than trying to explain to a droid on the phone.

If the quality monitor shows no issues then it's something "your side" of the hub.
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Thanks. I set it running last night at midnight, so I’ll get a couple of days worth and try and register again on their forum.
 
Hi folks

So Virgin could see a problem and tried to auto fix, then a remote engineer did ‘something’ and today a field engineer came out and changed my Hub 4 for a new one.

I still get a 1 second disconnection exactly every 6 minutes over both wired and wifi.

I guess I’ll have to book a further engineer visit but does anyone have any insight as to what the root cause may be please? They’re saying it’s all good up to the router but after changing the router the issue persists
 
What does the TBB monitor show? Are you using any other switches or wireless access points? Have you tried disconnecting everything and just having the PC or console connected direct with a cable and see if just having one device if it still has the issue?
 
RussZS said:
I still get a 1 second disconnection exactly every 6 minutes over both wired and wifi.
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Have you tried running pings to both the internet but also to the router itself at the same time, just to confirm it's certainly something WAN related.
 
Duke said:
What does the TBB monitor show? Are you using any other switches or wireless access points? Have you tried disconnecting everything and just having the PC or console connected direct with a cable and see if just having one device if it still has the issue?
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Hi, yea I’ve tried all of that and now bought a Asus AX82u and still have the exact same issue.

Had another engineer booked for yesterday 4-7 but they didn’t show. I guess I’ll just have to keep at them until an engineer shows but after two Hub 4’s and a new router it surely must be an issue with the signal coming into the house?
 
I’ve tried a few network cables and the issue persists. It’s from Amazon and is Cat6 I believe

As I say it affects wifi too and other connected devices both wired and wifi. Virgin can’t see the issue from their end and I seem to be getting nowhere with getting another engineer out
 
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