Virgin Media Upload Speed Upgrades

I've been having terrible download speeds from Steam for the last couple of weeks, and my 10mb connection seems to be running at 1.5mb. Virgin say it's high network utilisation (i.e. they've oversold in my area again) but I'm wondering if there's an element of traffic shaping in there too.

If they're traffic shaping Steam packets I shall be onto the ISPA (Internet Service Providers Association) again. That was the only way I got any action before, and it was pretty swift!

I shall try an experiment - starting a Steam download just before midnight and seeing if it suddenly increases in speed past midnight. I'm getting my full speed in the morning at the moment.
 
so if they cap you for downloading a lot in an hour. do they expect us to close our downloads every 30 mins for 30 mins to ever download anything? this means that if you put steam on and download a game i have to make sure i turn it off every 30 mins to stop my internet being capped from 50mb to 512kb for potentially 12 hours?
 
I called Virgin today and it waste pretty much a waste of time. So I managed to speak to a 'supervisor' and convinced them that my line must be faulty if they are not doing anything too it, someone will be out atfter 5pm on Friday to look at my connection, lets see what he makes of this half ***** 50Mb.
 
Journey said:
I called Virgin today and it waste pretty much a waste of time. So I managed to speak to a 'supervisor' and convinced them that my line must be faulty if they are not doing anything too it, someone will be out atfter 5pm on Friday to look at my connection, lets see what he makes of this half ***** 50Mb.
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Nice one ;)

I will be doing the same if the tech does not call me at 5pm like they said they would.
 
There is lots of complaints about terrible virgin services since they plan to bring in 100Mb and new upload increasing and new traffic management. Pretty very sad indeed, virgin only want your money not your service need.

Virgin shouldn't bring out 100Mb if there is going to be throttling in steam, gaming, youtubes, bbci player, sky player and so on. They say they are not throttling but it a real proof that they already done on 10Mb, 20Mb and now 50Mb.

I might consider move back to ADSL with 8Mb without any traffic management, so, that mean Virgin Media will going to lose alots of customers quickly.

I had now downgrade back to 10Mb L size broadband only. £20 a month. Not worth to pay extra £10 for 20Mb or extra £15 for 50Mb for all these silly traffic throttling.
 
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bulldog147 said:
I might consider move back to ADSL with 8Mb without any traffic management, so, that mean Virgin Media will going to lose alots of customers quickly.
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Sadly you are completely wrong about this, they will not lose a lot of customers fast, the only people that will move or complain are the heavy users and that probably makes up for 5% of their subscription base.

With most people having to chose a subpar ADSL exchange with no guarentee that you will get anywhere close to the advertised speeds then Virgin will probably keep the customer all be it on a lower teir tarrif this of course will have an adverse effect on there ARPU and will the probably be re-examined once they have finished upgrading the network so it can cope with the new demands customers are placing on it.
 
I was getting 6.9Mb with ADSL before moving to cable. When I was on 6.9Mb with IDNet, they never throttling my line transfer speed all day, all night. Virgin is the worse I ever seen in traffic management from now on.

I will check speed and traffic shaping at 5pm see if they throttling my 10Mb large size.
 
My result after 5pm with 10Mb service:





So, there is no traffic shaping on my 10Mb but my 50Mb is much worse than 10Mb yesterday, the day before, and a week before in all day. So, I can tell 50Mb is traffic shaping badly.
 
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I'm getting shaped on my 10mb service. At 4:50pm I started an NZB download on port 553 with SSL and had a steady 1.2MB/sec right until 5pm, where it's now dropped to around 400KB/sec with fluctuations dropping it to 200KB/sec. Changing port to 443 and I'm back at 1.2MB/sec.

Diffprobe, well it depends where they stream their data from surely? HTTP is unaffected, if that's what they use, for example.
 
Im on 50mb and my connection isnt being shaped according to diffprobe:

Code: 
DiffProbe beta release. October 2009. Build 1002.
Shaper Detection Module.

Connected to server 74.63.50.40.

Estimating capacity:
Upstream: 1536 Kbps.
Downstream: 50654 Kbps.

The measurement will take upto 3.0 minutes. Please wait.

Checking for traffic shapers:

Upstream: No shaper detected.
Median received rate: 1530 Kbps.

Downstream: No shaper detected.
Median received rate: 49765 Kbps.

For more information, visit: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~partha/diffprobe

But for 2 weeks my latency has been erratic and causes me to warp and lag in all games. Makes the connection unusable for me. Even using communications applications like ventrilo and mumble are hopeless due to the lag.

Engineer came round just now after a phone call to support yesterday. He ran a speed test and saw that I was getting very good speeds. I already told him its not a speed issue, its a ping issue. He basically didnt know what was going on and phoned someone else who is apparently more senior. He is coming tomorrow.

But I suspect he will say the same - he will run "ping" from command line and then try and tell me some bs about how every 5th ping is going to be high. Thats not what it was showing, it was very random, and when it was high it was almost treble! I told him I dont care how well it pings to bbc website, all I know is that I cant play games and it happened suddenly since 2 weeks ago.

I mean look at this:




2 weeks ago my jitter was 1-2ms. Now its more than 50% of my ping. Online games are unplayable because of this. Is that really difficult to understand? This engineer really had a problem understanding that this sort of variance in ping is going to cause problems.

Im not that hopeful to be honest. I think they have just broken it and thats the way its going to be. Going to have to switch back to ADSL.
 
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Diffprobe is wrong, just tried it on mine and it said I wasn't being shaped when clearly I am. It's useless for us VM users.
 
DiffProbe detects if your speed is reduced while the download or upload is active. So if your speed is being throttled, you run DiffProbe and the speed doesn't drop during the downlaod, DiffProbe won't report any throttleing. Because it started at the throttled speed and didn't drop any further during the test.
 





DiffProbe beta release. October 2009. Build 1002.
Shaper Detection Module.

Connected to server 74.63.50.40.

Estimating capacity:
Upstream: 1655 Kbps.
Downstream: 14638 Kbps.

The measurement will take upto 2.5 minutes. Please wait.

Checking for traffic shapers:

Upstream: No shaper detected.
Median received rate: 1642 Kbps.

Downstream: No shaper detected.
Median received rate: 14336 Kbps.

For more information, visit: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~partha/diffprobe
 
Its 8:25 in the morning, thought I would check this out before going to work:



Thats much better! Why cant it be like that all the time.

Btw a heads up, there was a firmware update for 50mb modem users on 29/09/10. Maybe that is the cause of all our problems?
 
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