What's wrong with my connection? (Virgin 10mb)

Soldato
Joined
17 Mar 2007
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Location
Plymouth
I'm using virgin 10mb shared with me and 2 other people at my uni house and it's been acting weird since we got it set up about 2 months ago. When I run speed test the ping times and up/download all seem fine:

speed.png


The problems appear when browsing, sometimes when I click a link it will take 5-15 seconds to start loading the page and sometimes it is instantaneous. Images on pages are even worse, it seems to randomly load some pictures fine, some partially and some not at all, take this shot of the random image thread for instance (note firefox says done at bottom left):

wtf.png


When I reload the page some of the missing ones appear and some of the ones that loaded before might not. My housemates have the same problems, it also happens when they are out with pcs turned off. I do live in a student area of Leeds but I did last year and had no problems on an identical connection.

What the hell is going on?:confused:
 
Packet loss maybe?

Run some ping tests..

Oh and I doubt it'll be fixed any time soon. I've been having problems with my 20Mb line for about 5 weeks. They don't seem to care.
 
This is what I get with ping test:

pingtest.png


I can't find the settings in the router to change to opendns, I'm using the latest netgear router that virgin provide. I've tried to look through all the settings but might have missed it:

router.png
 
Run WinMTR and type in BBC.co.uk for e.g and it'll show all the connections from your PC to the destination.
Here's mine, browsing does seem laggy tonight for me altho I get 9.85 on the speed test

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
|cpc3-brom9-2-0-gw.wolv.cable.virginmedia.com - 0 | 9 | 9 | 0 | 6 | 16 | 0 |
|brom-geam-1a-ge214.network.virginmedia.net - 0 | 9 | 9 | 0 | 14 | 32 | 0 |
|wolv-core-1a-tenge81.network.virginmedia.net - 0 | 9 | 9 | 0 | 19 | 47 | 15 |
|manc-bb-1a-ae7-0.network.virginmedia.net - 0 | 9 | 9 | 15 | 26 | 47 | 31 |
|glfd-bb-1b-ae1-0.network.virginmedia.net - 0 | 9 | 9 | 15 | 17 | 31 | 15 |
|glfd-tmr-1-ae5-0.network.virginmedia.net - 0 | 9 | 9 | 15 | 21 | 47 | 16 |
| redb-ic-1-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net - 0 | 8 | 8 | 16 | 33 | 62 | 31 |
| 212.58.239.249 - 0 | 8 | 8 | 16 | 119 | 281 | 16 |
| 212.58.238.149 - 0 | 8 | 8 | 15 | 25 | 62 | 15 |
| virtual-vip.thdo.bbc.co.uk - 0 | 8 | 8 | 15 | 25 | 62 | 62 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR - 0.8. Copyleft @2000-2002 Vasile Laurentiu Stanimir ( [email protected] )
 
I tried running the dns benchmark when i went out for a bit, annoyingly it came back with the two best dns servers being the virgin servers i'm already pointed at:

dns.png


I tried setting the primary dns server on my computer as the third one in that list but the problem persists.
 
You may have to look through the configuration for DNS servers. (That's if that particular router even supports it). I personally use Google's DNS servers, a lot better than Virgins! (I'm on virgin).

They are:

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4
 
maybe being throttled? since its a only a 10mb line downloading a little could mean you get throttled a lot.
 
The problems happens all the time, for instance I ran that speedtest about 2 minutes after taking the random image thread picture which means it isn't throttling related.

Something along the line is amiss, and I doubt it is all 3 computers on our router (i'm using ethernet and my housemates are using wireless so it's not due to weak wireless signal).

Really unimpressed with virgin this time round, a rep came and set up the router for us and said the connection would be active within 48 hours, it actually took over 2 weeks and about £30 worth of calls to virgin:mad: and this problem ever since.
 
try the ping test. ping google or bbc.co.uk
just open up a cmd prompt and type "ping bbc.co.uk -n 50"
it should then show you how long its taking. if you find the ping is spiking badly (say from 20 to 100+) then its likely to be your line.

I doubt its to do with being throttled as i have 10Mbp from virgin as well and you'd end up with a 2.5Mbp line after being throttled which would still be plenty fast to get a good ping.
 
Ping time to the bbc seem ok but there is a bit of a spike with google, there is a good gap between each ping though, maybe they are actually much worse when loading a page. What can I do about it though? Virgin are the only cable provider and I don't want to risk slow adsl. I really don't want to waste more money ringing them either.

pingtimes.png
 
hmm your ping was better than mine! also i got 1-2 spikes in the 200ms figure :o
as for what to do, not much really i just tend to refresh the page and continue on my way.
although thinking about it i am on wireless. can you try connecting the modem wired up to your laptop/pc to see if the results are better/same?
 
I'm using an ethernet cable on my computer already, refreshing the page doesn't help. Any page with a lot of pictures will regularly not load a few images. The fresh random image thread is probably the worst though, it takes a good 30s to a minute to finish loading what it can. If I refresh it takes the same amount of time again. Refreshing just any old page that happens to be loading slowly can make it load instantly though.

It's weird because back in sheffield on a BE connection and last year in a different house with virgin 10mb I never had this problem.
 
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