Virgin & Gaming :(

Tweaker

Tweaker

Tweaker

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Joined
24 Sep 2008
Posts
1,757
For the last week i can barely play online in the evening, its getting ridiculous now. When i call the helpline they dont know what i am talking about. My ping goes all over the place, latency to servers just goes to hell and in Counter strike souce i warp all over the place and it affects other players much more than me. Here is Virgins info

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Here is my ping test, at 4ish in the afternoon all is fine, then in the evening. :(

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Who can i call for a real answer why this is happening, i would take 1mb Internet for lower pings.
 
My line's been absolute **** the last week during the evenings.

--- 94.168.4.1 ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 20% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 5.518/67.209/157.204/57.692 ms

Ping to the gateway that I'm on, 20% is good at the moment tbh it was 40% earlier.
 
Mine's been like this since mid november in Bristol. Online gaming is impossible, lots of pages won't load. I'm frequently getting pings over 150 ms and up ot 50% packet loss.

I didn't even bother with the call centre as last time it took me 5 calls to get to someone who could actually help me.

The problem has arisen due to massive oversubscription of the network, and is particularly bad at peak times and is massively worse for me when student term starts, with there being a large student population here in Bristol (myself included).

Bottom line is, we're not getting what we're paying for (cable isn't that cheap too) so it needs to be sorted.

I've contacted their second line support technicians via the support newsgroup. replies, help and info are quick to arrive there, despite the group being manned by some of their tecchies in their own time from what I understand. To set up the newsgroup do the following (thanks to sephiroth from the virgin support forums):

... posting a help request on the VM support newsgroup, who are 2nd line support techs and will respond quickly to you. If you're on Vista or Windows 7, you would use Windows Live Mail (a standard part of your system).

You'd click the "Newsgroups" link at the bottom of the screen and then Tools/Accounts then Add/Newsgroup Account.

Give your Display Name (like kiloman), your e-mail address then your server address for the newsgroup which is "news.virginmedia.com".

You'll then be able (via the Newsgroups menu item) to select the Virgin media icon on the left of a search panel, click on "All" and wait a few minutes till it's finished listing thousands of newsgroups.

Scroll down to "Virginmedia.support.broadband.cable" and double click it.

And you're there. You can post your stuff.
Click to expand...

I contacted them yesterday night and there's someone coming round on friday (could have been today if I wanted!) to sort out my upload power problem, though the oversubscription issues are more widespread and fixes seem to be taking longer. If mine isn't sorted out soon I'm going to take things further. I have the email address of the CEO should a call to their support prove fruitless.

Let me know how you get on if you get someone round to have a look at it.

Hope that helps

Alex
 
The problem I had when I was with NTL/Virgin is that when they send out an engineer, obviously it is during working hours when the ping spikes and PL is a lot better.

Obviously just getting to that stage was hard enough as with their call centre in Timbuktu who ask the most irrelevant questions even getting them to understand the problem is hard enough (the fact they didn't even know what "packet loss" meant says it all really).

Final straw was when they sent out a second engineer who never turned up. Thankfully they changed their pricing so I was able to terminate my contract early.
 
Yep, guess it's a similar situation here.

There is a large student population in my area and I'm sure that during the summer my line was superb. Come September it was getting pretty poor during peak times. Over Christmas it was great (like it had been, i.e. 10ms pings solid 5.5MB/sec downloads) and now litteraly come 2nd week of Jan it has been utterly useless.

I'm certainly in the mood for complaining as its so bad now that the service is next to useless for what it is intended. I will probably go look at the newsgroups this weekend.

Failing that maybe sorting the issue or at least getting an honest answer from VM I will just cut the whole thing off and get a Be line with AAISP.
 
ive never had any problem's with virgin, if its only in the evenings then its quite obvious what the problem is, there is too many people using the internet in the evenings in your area.

the only way to solve this would be switching ISP's, or upgrading to 50MB.

because it works fine throughout the day when people are at school/uni/work, but when they all come home, then your having problem's, thats the reason why they have traffic shaping, to stop the type of people in your are downloading too much at peak times, prohibiting you from using your net. personally i would upgrade to 50MB, virgin's service is really good.
 
virgin used to be amazing for me on online gaming . even years back on the 1mb line id get <10 pings and always first person into servers etc.


but in the last few weeks my connections been well knackered. hopefully its just temporary because theres no alternative tbh. i never want to go back to the 40yr old phonelines
 
Psycho Sonny said:
... i would upgrade to 50MB, virgin's service is really good.
Click to expand...

I'm on the 50Mbit service. It's still useless.

And yes, I understand that it is a contended (very heavily by the looks of it) service. But there is a difference between a slight slow down in the evenigns at peak time (fully expected with such an ISP) and the service grinding to a halt and exhibiting so much packet loss - between my router and the edge of their network - that it is next to useless.

I seriously doubt it is my router, or my router config as I use real hardware and I know what I am doing with it.
 
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Ive got 50mb in a highly populated student area in portsmouth everyone rants about VM (i do a networking course) however no-one is happy to upgrade to 50mg i have it and have next to no issues (modem drops out every 5 days) the differenet servers, make it appear like theres no issues my ping is around 12 and speed nearly 50mb 24/7

VM are the sole supplier of cable internet so they can getaway with over subscribing but unless im very mistaken is it really a problem they can resolve surely the number of people connected is the main issue and that the system was never designed to take this amount of users at this speed? if thats the case then is it their problem? at least not solely.

However i would ring and if they transfer to 100 different people nag them and moan and keep moving up the ladder and when youve been on the phone for 30mins tell them so and ask them for compensation since you've got no where ask them for new router's and modems and an engineer to come out and show him the reports from speed.net etc they are often alright guys ive found the one we had round was and was been to show us the best places to do speed.net from (maidenhead iirc)

hope this helps
 
speedtest.net Is generally inaccurate in my experience and I wouldn't trust it to measure the throughout of a piece of string. I have Cacti running at the moment measuring loss/latency to a variety of destinations and I will be using that to show VM just how bad the problem gets at specific times of day.

Yes is clearly is a capacity issue and yes that is their problem. As I mentioned above I have no problem with it being a contended service, but there is a huge disparity between something that is slightly reduced in performance on the odd occasion and something that is just downright broken for the most part of the day.

It's also going to be fairly location specific, I'm sure that a few streets up on a different UBR things may be better, but again that is no excuse.

IMO also the modem resyncing every 5 days is crap and you should get that looked at. Mine is generally fine unless I unplug it.
 
Yer i no its not ideal but put it down to not rebooting after a dns release

Ok take it back ive looked into it and realise they use their own exchange so over subscribe needs sorting, and i feel people should be compensated for this

Yes it is quite area specific and even street but surely in bristol you should get better speeds than that!

Portsmouth has two xchanges and i have mates who are in the area ofthe other xchange which get the same speed as we do, but im not sure how to tell if the cable exchanges are in the came place?

As for speed test the engineer said something about using that server as VM have contrabuted to it so it is the most reliable and free for 50mg testing however we ran that and 2 seconds later ran a 1gb download from a mates server in blue square with 100mb line and got the same maxed out 50mb/s so it seemed pretty true, at the same time we tried the mancester server and the london one and only got around 20mb/s, it doesnt help that the file size or number of files they use are small so the net often wont get up to speed before the test ends, or so it seems.
 
I'm on VM's 20Mb package and the connection has been poor all year, with the period after xmas almost unuseable during the day.

10am-2am a speed of 0.5-2Mb/s with 50-60% packet loss
anytime before 9am I can get 18-19Mb/s with next to no packet loss

I can understand that they aren't in breach of their own contract by providing "up to" 20Mb/s but surely it must breach a quality of service or something? Ie. if you buy a product you expect it to work for a reasonable period.

Exeter has a facebook group created yesterday with over 1,000 members planning to sit-in/protest in the high street's VM store, however, as there is only a sales team in there, I can't see this achieving much other than perhaps raising people's awareness of the awful service.
 
Well I got bored with my connection being unusable again today (high loss according to my monitoring all day) so when I got home called VM.

They confirmed they can see consistent packet loss from my modem all the way through their network and are sending an engineer around tomorrow with a new modem and to test the coax etc. so we shall we what happens when he does that.

@kerrgreg throughout isn't so much of the issue here as the poor quality of service that it's delivering.

Never used to have a problem 95% of the day with the service it was spot on, but of late (and really I'm talking about the last 2-3 months in particular) it has gotten very very bad to the point where it's pretty much broken.

Online gaming is utterly pointless, streaming stuff on iPlayer gets frequently interrupted, even general web browsing now seems to be a bit much for it and god forbid if I fancied using my VoIP line to do anything right now :)
 
Getting a 22m/s just now with 0% loss on 50mb. Not bad but it's not as good as I had on the 20mb. Unfortunately I think Virgin are more concerned with how fast you can download that game in the first place than with anything else.
 
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