Virgin Media Discussion Thread

[Jay85]

Since I've moved out of the city centre last week I've had to get rid of my beloved Hyperoptic to VM - 2 bed house, office upstairs (in the 2nd bedroom) get absolutely garbage WiFi with the superhub - what is the best 3rd party home router to use these days? I don't need anything advanced anymore - can configure network devices no problem if it's more of a geeks router. Mainly want decent wifi coverage across the house.

Drop the hub, its crap! The sole purpose of our hub now is just a modem interface while using a Mesh system TP link Deco M4. I've not had a single dropout since switching to this and i have a lot of devices connected constantly.

On our M200 connection i get around 240/250 constant, i rarely get anything slower than this. Only off putting thing is i have to haggle them constantly on renewal to give me a decent price!

 

[ChrisD.]

Running a network stress test on an OS few people use isn't real world though.

Ah you've come out of the woodwork then.

 

[Disco_P]

Ah you've come out of the woodwork then.

Well you did say something exceptionally silly

 

[ChrisD.]

Well you did say something exceptionally silly

12 vs 13? Who gives a ****

Really? I just explained your own post, and that it shows exactly what we said. I’m not entirely sure how that can be constituted as expeptionally silly.

 

[DiNZi]

Any advice on what price I should be holding out for?

I was paying £45.00 a month for BB/TV/Phone (Big Oomph Bundle) Mixit TV, M200, Talk More Anytime, Line Rental Mobile 5GB SIM.

I've been offered £39.00 per month on the WhatsApp chat today for BB/TV/Phone Mixit TV, M200, Talk More Anytime, Line Rental Mobile 10GB SIM (Volt O2).

Anybody got a similar package and recently renewed, how much are you paying? Thanks

 

[Rainmaker]

Running a network stress test on an OS few people use isn't real world though.

That statement is so ignorant, I'm genuinely not sure where to begin (or, honestly, if it's worth the bother).

It doesn't matter which OS you run it on. As it happens, flent runs anywhere but Windows, including on macOS. Your router isn't running Windows. Your switch isn't running Windows. The core network at your ISP isn't running Windows. The Internet isn't running on Windows, either. When you flood your Internet connection with traffic and choke it because of bufferbloat (you lose packets because the buffers are full to overrunning and there's no fair queuing or other congestion control), it doesn't matter one jot whether that traffic emanated from a Windows machine, a Raspberry Pi running Debian, a FreeBSD server or a mobile phone. Traffic is traffic. Just the same, running an RRUL test (which is an industry standard, btw) emulates the type of traffic that will saturate a line in both directions and then measure what breaks. Did you even read the website?

What you said is akin to saying 'We can't measure the impact force of a 2 tonne car travelling at 70mph if that car is a Ferrari, because few people drive those. We need to test the impact force of a 2 tonne Ford car travelling at 70mph, because they're more common'... The marque of car is absolutely irrelevant to what's being measured, and why it's being measured. In that case, the salient variables are the mass and the speed, not what sicker is on the front of it.

In our case, the test is 'How does the connection's latency, jitter and bufferbloat present when under full TCP and/or UDP load?'. Where that test runs from is immaterial. Do you honestly think the Internet engineers at IETF, Cloudflare, RedHat, Google and others are all firing up Windows boxes because 'more people use them at home'? LOL TBF, I'm not singling you out here. Earlier, completely misinterpreted the difference between two sets of pings on an almost idle line (a speedtest is basically zero load). And that's fine. Not everyone knows too much about networks, or any other subject matter. The trick is to realise the things you don't know much about and (1) fix it and/or (2) not talk smack about it until you do.

If you prefer a test from Windows, give this little fella a go and post up your results. It's the Waveform bufferbloat test and it does a nice job of properly saturating the connection with packets and then making pretty graphs of the results. It'll be interesting to see what you come up with.

 

[Rainmaker]

None of that is "real world" to 99% of users.

As above. Of course how your connection behaves when being used heavily is real world. Do the Waveform test in my last post and post up your results.

 

[ChrisD.]

not talk smack about it until you do

But clearly minimum ping is all.

 

[MartinPrince]

... The trick is to realise the things you don't know much about and (1) fix it and/or (2) not talk smack about it until you do. ...

That axiom could be said for many other things.

Here is that test run on my 600Mb VM BB.

 

[Caged]

If you have to load a connection to 100% and run benchmarking on it to prove there's an issue, then is there an issue? I'm not being facetious here - I can see both sides of the argument, but "the connection that you have no issues with day-to-day is bad actually, run this test to see" is going to find a fairly limited audience. These are cheap broadband products with no SLA attached, and while I'd like to see more sane queuing algorithms built into residential gateways by default, brute-forcing it by having a large enough pipe that nothing sits in the network for too long is a valid way around the problem.

Nobody is arguing Virgin Media is a high quality service, but they are the only viable option for huge numbers of people due to decades of policy failure.

 

[Rainmaker]

If you have to load a connection to 100% and run benchmarking on it to prove there's an issue, then is there an issue? I'm not being facetious here - I can see both sides of the argument, but "the connection that you have no issues with day-to-day is bad actually, run this test to see" is going to find a fairly limited audience. These are cheap broadband products with no SLA attached, and while I'd like to see more sane queuing algorithms built into residential gateways by default, brute-forcing it by having a large enough pipe that nothing sits in the network for too long is a valid way around the problem.

Nobody is arguing Virgin Media is a high quality service, but they are the only viable option for huge numbers of people due to decades of policy failure.

Fair comment about VM, and you're correct. The problem doesn't just manifest when you run specific tests though, that's just how you empirically demonstrate the issue exists. Two points: (1) Several clients in one home can cause the exact same issue just by doing 'regular' things, and (2) the issue isn't just specific to your home. VM nodes are just that - everyone in your street is effectively sharing a pipe, which is why your neighbour hammering torrents and watching 4K whatever impacts you (and why they had the dreaded traffic management for so many years). So 'I don't use my line that much' isn't a defence against bufferbloat. Many of the threads posted here about drops, lost packets, crap video calls, dropped VOIP packets and glitchy streaming can be attributed to congestion and bufferbloat, either in-house or further up the node at street level. DOCSIS 4 actually has a baked in FQ now called docsis-pie, but despite it being baked in and free, VM didn't enable it on the CPE (SuperHubs) or head end routers. Go figure.

Edit: My own Waveform bufferbloat test for reference. Ignore the screwy speed ratio, I have servers running and four kids hammering the network. Yet even then, on VM it's possible with the right router and congestion control enabled...

 

[Rainmaker]

That axiom could be said for many other things.

Here is that test run on my 600Mb VM BB.

Very typical of a VM connection. That massive surge in latency is what you'd expect without congestion control (cake, fq_codel et al.) enabled. Thanks for posting it!

 

[chroniclard]

Real world usage = daughter streaming netflix, boy online gaming, me doing random stuff/gaming/downloading, wife browsing web. All totally fine on VM.

 

[Disco_P]

Real world usage = daughter streaming netflix, boy online gaming, me doing random stuff/gaming/downloading, wife browsing web. All totally fine on VM.

Yeah I share the VM connection with 3 netflix addicts, I do a helluva lot of downloading whilst gaming.

Playing modern warfare on wifi with my asus ac86 is no different to the gigabit wired connection which only has my computer on it.

The trick is to realise the things you don't know much about and (1) fix it and/or (2) not talk smack about it until you do.

If you prefer a test from Windows, give this little fella a go and post up your results. It's the Waveform bufferbloat test and it does a nice job of properly saturating the connection with packets and then making pretty graphs of the results. It'll be interesting to see what you come up with.

I won't deny that I don't know much about networking. But equally the trick is also to recognise when you know an awful lot about a subject and have very high standards on it. Not sure what your point was with the ferrari, my point was the example of a "real world" test needing a machine running linux then is it actually real world?

I will run the waveform test.

 

[Duke]

I won't deny that I don't know much about networking. But equally the trick is also to recognise when you know an awful lot about a subject and have very high standards on it.

Completely agree with this. Its getting a boring when the same two keep jumping on every post made in here and go over the top as their standards are so high. Yes we get proper FTTP is better, unfortunately not everyone can get it and in fact most wouldn't notice the difference either.

I've not seen this Waveform test before, my results are below for VM 350Mbit (spoiler alert it isn't "perfect"!):

 

[uvarvu]

Just ran the waveform test myself. My connection is not suitable for gaming even under ideal conditions! Good job I don’t play online like that but my wife gets annoyed with the lag when playing Fall Guys.

 

[Rainmaker]

Completely agree with this. Its getting a boring when the same two keep jumping on every post made in here and go over the top as their standards are so high. Yes we get proper FTTP is better, unfortunately not everyone can get it and in fact most wouldn't notice the difference either.

For the record I'm on VM too, there's no FTTP here yet. Easy solution is to stop wasting my time educating the disinterested, it's not like I get anything out of spending the time to post. If someone posted something inaccurate or had an issue, I'd point out how it could be improved and why. This is the VM discussion thread, which is what took place. I'm not jumping into every random thread shouting about bufferbloat. That the gamers on here can't tell the difference between WiFi to wet string and multimode fibre doesn't change the realities. But fair dos, I'm out.

 

[Rainmaker]

Just ran the waveform test myself. My connection is not suitable for gaming even under ideal conditions! Good job I don’t play online like that but my wife gets annoyed with the lag when playing Fall Guys.

No, it's OK. Nobody can tell the difference.

 

[Disco_P]

Ran the test on the VM and Vodafone CF connections.

 

[uvarvu]

No, it's OK. Nobody can tell the difference.

Hehe

I can also say that whenever I receive or make FaceTime calls my phone always switches off WiFi and drops to cellular. At my place I receive a 5G signal but the speed is only 10mbs. I’m pretty sure it does that because it doesn’t think my connection is suitable.