Virgin Media Discussion Thread

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hmm, ive just received a text to say my new kit will arrive on Wednesday, ive not asked for the SH5 yet, they must have done it as part of the upgrade. lets see

Hopefully it will be a SH5 though from experience VirginMedia is one company that has often surprised me, and not in a good way. ;)
When I did my new contract they did say they would send me out a new hub5 until I mentioned I had one already.
 
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I got my hub 5 about a year ago for free. Last month they doubled my broadband speed to150meg and reduced the price from £39 to £26 a month so I can't complain.

Had a few days when I've had no service but not very often.

Biggest bugbear is that they frequently do line maintenance / firmware updates at 12am when I'm often up late gaming
 
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Soldato
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I was still have random issues with my connection, last week I finally got an engineer, he checked everything and said he would swap the hub, I asked for a hub 5, he said he would get me one next week.

Today he installed it and it all seems to be working ok. Hopefully it fixes the issues I was having.
 
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Sh5 installed last night, all working ok in modem mode to my pfsense router

If i was to upgrade my network to 10Gbe, how would one connect the 2.5Gbe on the SH5 to pfsense? i understand il need a 10Gbe card for pfsense, but how about the SH5 side? a media converter?
 
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@Rainmaker et al. I am kind of curious if the bufferbloat has got any better in your country? I see samknows is all over the subject ( ) , I've heard of cake on new CPE, docsis 4 stuff... but don't have an field data. I've busied myself since finishing up the mikrotik cake thing on a few other projects, my current one (plug! sorry!) is https://libreqos.io which is a transparent middlebox targetted at smaller ISPs, running cake in both directions, tested to 20Gbit, 20k subscribers. It's always been best to have the down shaped at the ISP (properly), and the up at the CPE, rather than both up and down as I encouraged you to do a year or two back... if your ISP is doing the right things, oh, even more amazing results are possible. Fun demo here:


Don't know if there are actually "smaller ISPs" in your country, but it would be nice if virgin media would at least turn on docsis 3.1 PIE....
 
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Rainmaker et al. I am kind of curious if the bufferbloat has got any better in your country? I see samknows is all over the subject ( ) , I've heard of cake on new CPE, docsis 4 stuff... but don't have an field data. I've busied myself since finishing up the mikrotik cake thing on a few other projects, my current one (plug! sorry!) is https://libreqos.io which is a transparent middlebox targetted at smaller ISPs, running cake in both directions, tested to 20Gbit, 20k subscribers. It's always been best to have the down shaped at the ISP (properly), and the up at the CPE, rather than both up and down as I encouraged you to do a year or two back... if your ISP is doing the right things, oh, even more amazing results are possible. Fun demo here:


Don't know if there are actually "smaller ISPs" in your country, but it would be nice if virgin media would at least turn on docsis 3.1 PIE....
Wonderful to hear from you, Dave. I'm glad you managed to finish wrestling with Mikrotik, I know you worked long and hard on that. As for bloat, I'd suggest I don't have enough data to speak for the country (or even a single ISP) as a whole; my own connection is motoring along with cake just beautifully still, however. This was just now at peak time (for the ISP and my household), with 6 people using the 'net simultaneously - including at least 2 children streaming video from YouTube or Netflix or whatever and 1 teenager gaming while the servers hum away in the background (>30 devices total):

bufferbloat-vm-1gig.jpg


I think with the current (almost) national push to roll out true FTTP (Openreach, CityFibre etc) bloat is coming down naturally as a consequence. VM are, unfortunately, sticking to their RFoG plans and despite them planting fibre literally a few metres from my door my network is none the better latency or bloat wise. Such a waste.

Core-last-108000.png


In better news, the Openreach/BT pole leaning against my garden wall has been fitted with a FTTP CRB connector, and Openreach tell me they are actively pulling fibre in my local exchange and I'll be able to order true FTTP with them very soon. Finally! :D I have already been in discussions with my preferred ISP's MD and arranged a /56 of IPv6 and a /29 of IPv4 so I can crack my knuckles and get the servers properly organised at last once it's lit. New edge router needed, I'm thinking 10G upgrades all round.

I did try to engage with VM about the absence of DOCSIS PIE and enabling it, but despite the rollout of a new far improved Hub (based on Broadcom, so no Puma chipset woes) they maintain the brick wall of deafening silence.

As for SME type ISPs, absolutely. Unlike the US, our nation is littered with everything from community projects to small ISPs through to the usual behemoths like BT and Liberty Global (VM). There are so many I shouldn't know where to begin to list them. A few have grown big (and good on them) since their start, but there are many small to medium sized outfits left, concentrating on a particular area of the country. Gone though are the days of spinning up a FreeBSD instance and starting a local ISP PoP on the fly, alas haha!

LibreQoS looks good, I'll have a proper look later when I get a chance. You may find interest in some of the smaller ISPs here, but they do tend to be FTTP based as I said. I hope you're suitably rested (ha!) and managing to find your way. Keep on battling the bogons and have a great festive period if we don't speak sooner. All the best!
 
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I have now seen more than a few awful implementions of fiber, everything from "femtotrenching", to oversubscription of the gpon, to overly agressive "policing", to total lack of ipv6, etc. So I have hope at least some of your isps are doing the right things for CPE and their headends, if not... hope that libreqos.io gets some users here.

great to hear from you, and as always, love your cake results, and hope everyone else on this forum is getting similar ones. Happy holidays/Merry christmas!
 
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Lovely result for fiber. I like especially that smokeping is reporting less latency than the smokeping average, sometimes. Some forms of fiber allow you to get inside the request/grant loop and can actually offer less latency under load for sparse packets than otherwise. Rainmaker and a few others here have fun some flent rrul tests against their gear, are you in a position to do that? Also ookla's speedtest is now reporting on some bufferbloat related statistics both in the app and the command line version ( ), tho they tend to understate the case. There is a new rust based test that runs on all OSes that produces a good plot also: https://github.com/Zoxc/crusader/releases/download/v0.0.9-testing/ - the staggered start test is very useful in particular. I have a server setup in my london DC, you can test it via:

crusader test london.starlink.taht.net
 
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There is a new rust based test that runs on all OSes that produces a good plot also: https://github.com/Zoxc/crusader/releases/download/v0.0.9-testing/ - the staggered start test is very useful in particular. I have a server setup in my london DC, you can test it via:

crusader test london.starlink.taht.net

Thanks for the heads up, I'd never heard of crusader. Here's mine, it'd be interesting to compare with yours @Turn, if you get chance.

nVfVg7Q.png

Edit: Image host shenanigans. If the pic looks small to you, force reload the page please. I've moved it to Imgur.
 
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zia

zia

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would love get close to that on my virigin media connection. both virigin media hub4 and asus rtac88u get a B rating, on a good day perhaps an A.
Still trying get hang of openwrt on my x86


Zia
 
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Soldato
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it'd be interesting to compare with yours @Turn, if you get chance.
ptghEy6.png
I have zero QoS on my MikroTik CHR gateway & NIC's aren't passthrough'd either, so just keep that in mind.
This is going through 3 LAN Routers FYI for the Crusader result, generally don't saturate so that's why I just haven't bothered with any QoS...

Lovely result for fiber. I like especially that smokeping is reporting less latency than the smokeping average, sometimes.
WYvtrt8.png
PfQQNiL.png
GO5coDa.png
9lCxqQr.png
SmokePing running on a Proxmox VM
 
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Soldato
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I have zero QoS on my MikroTik CHR gateway & this is going through 3 LAN Routers FYI for the Crusader result, not sure if that makes much difference here, most of the high latency is probs caused by the lack of QoS.
Generally don't saturate so that's why I just haven't bothered with any QoS...
Just checking, but you didn't have a VPN enabled when you ran the test, did you? My results with WireGuard enabled look strikingly similar (including the sudden appearance of packet loss and the weird spiking pattern)... Enable QoS (cake) on the MikroTik, our Dave wrote it so it must be good. :D
 
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Just checking, but you didn't have a VPN enabled when you ran the test, did you?
Nope, could be my MikroTik CHR not running w/ a passthrough for the NIC's? Not sure how much impact that'd possibly have under load, haven't ever extensively benchmarked it.
I'm using FastTrack :cry:, but yeah I would enable QoS but I literally never ever max out my upload to be honest, unless I'm doing a speedtest.

I have a lot of virtualization going on over here lol, and lots of switches, so my results aren't maybe as good as if everything was bare metal and I was plugged directly in.
 
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Soldato
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would love get close to that on my virigin media connection. both virigin media hub4 and asus rtac88u get a B rating, on a good day perhaps an A.
Still trying get hang of openwrt on my x86


Zia

Try this (change your WAN interface as necessary):

Code:
config queue 'eth0' #YOUR WAN INTERFACE HERE
option verbosity '5'
option interface 'eth0' #YOUR WAN INTERFACE HERE
option debug_logging '1'
option ingress_ecn 'ECN'
option qdisc 'cake'
option squash_ingress '1'
option qdisc_really_really_advanced '1'
option qdisc_advanced '1'
option egress_ecn 'NOECN'
option squash_dscp '1'
option script 'piece_of_cake.qos'
option eqdisc_opts 'docsis nat ack-filter dual-srchost noatm'
option linklayer 'none'
option enabled '1'
option iqdisc_opts 'docsis besteffort ingress nat dual-dsthost noatm'
option upload '48000'
option download '930000'

Leave the webUI QoS alone, just replace the sqm config with this and restart the service and then test again. Tweak the upload and download as necessary. You may get better results with 47000 and 940000 or even into the 800s (820000 and 47000 maybe). Just experiment, but the above gave A+ for me.
 
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Associate
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ptghEy6.png
I have zero QoS on my MikroTik CHR gateway & NIC's aren't passthrough'd either, so just keep that in mind.
This is going through 3 LAN Routers FYI for the Crusader result, generally don't saturate so that's why I just haven't bothered with any QoS...


WYvtrt8.png
PfQQNiL.png
GO5coDa.png
9lCxqQr.png
SmokePing running on a Proxmox VM
well, by most conventional standards, the 60ms on the upload is "good enough" for most purposes, including gaming and voip, and I hope, is a common outcome for basic fiber installs everywhere. My goal was 20ms in general, but compared to everything out there, 60ms under load is amazing. You can, however, by applying cake (and since you are a gbit symmetric, *unshaped*, just native on the interface instead of the default fifo), might do better. A metric ton of folk seem to think you have to shape at native rates, and on a device with BQL and cake or fq_codel, that's not the case. So far as I know mikrotik still uses a fifo by default.

As for the download, well, again, very good by most standards. shaping inbound will cost serious cpu and might do more harm than good on older gear (x86 can keep up, I'm not familiary with the mikrotik you are using)

But I'd love it if you slapped cake on the interface queue rather than the default....

PS I am a little sensitive about two things - QoS as I understand it, does packet prioritization only. cake does QoS *and* "SQM" - smart queue management, intelligently interleaving the packets (FQ) and controlling queue length (AQM), so I've been on a decade long quest to distinguish between the two concepts without much luck. https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki/Smart_Queue_Management/ . Secondly, when using a userspace vpn, interleaving (FQ-ing) the packets at the router becomes impossible and the router needs to rely on AQM to reduce the latency of the flows, which is more inaccurate and takes a fairly long time. Work is proceding to make AQMs more effective, and for a vpn at the bottleneck and cake (or fq_codeled) router, there is an optimization that makes FQ work and get things under control much more quickly. I've also long been after the userspace vpn makers to monitor the RTT internally (via pping), and/or apply fq_codel internally to them to what extent they can.
 
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zia

zia

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Joined
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Posts
715
Try this (change your WAN interface as necessary):

Code:
config queue 'eth0' #YOUR WAN INTERFACE HERE
option verbosity '5'
option interface 'eth0' #YOUR WAN INTERFACE HERE
option debug_logging '1'
option ingress_ecn 'ECN'
option qdisc 'cake'
option squash_ingress '1'
option qdisc_really_really_advanced '1'
option qdisc_advanced '1'
option egress_ecn 'NOECN'
option squash_dscp '1'
option script 'piece_of_cake.qos'
option eqdisc_opts 'docsis nat ack-filter dual-srchost noatm'
option linklayer 'none'
option enabled '1'
option iqdisc_opts 'docsis besteffort ingress nat dual-dsthost noatm'
option upload '48000'
option download '930000'

Leave the webUI QoS alone, just replace the sqm config with this and restart the service and then test again. Tweak the upload and download as necessary. You may get better results with 47000 and 940000 or even into the 800s (820000 and 47000 maybe). Just experiment, but the above gave A+ for me.

thank you, going to wipe and install fresh latest openwrt and will try you settings.

Zia
 
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