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Thread: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    It's FTTC with cat6 from the cabinet to the premises.
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    My broadband speed - 750 Meganibbles/minute

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    Oh that's interesting, I've not heard about it yet. Is TV still over coax?

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    Got what I guess is the final call back earlier. To sum it up, it seems single-thread problems aren't recognised as faults by Virgin, and it might not improve because of this. Apparently they used to pay attention to it, but not since 60Mbps. I asked why single thread is now massively worse than even 60Mbps but I couldn't get an answer other than he contacted everyone from networks to the faults team.

    Well, at least I know where I stand now. Such a shame their very capable HFC network is being strangled by the core network.

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    Hey watercooled. I didn't read all the posts in this thread but I did read alot. Having been on VM and having experience of the same kinda problem I learnt it was just down to speed throttling/packet shaping or whatever they want to call it.

    Basically during busy peak times they throttle the speeds in busy areas so that the bandwidth gets shared out. That's why you'll see that it happens at peak times but if you try the same thing at about 1am it will generally be perfect. And if you speak to VM they'll never admit that as a 'fault' because it's part of the service. The contention ratios on VM is what kills it so if you have a bunch of people in your hood that like downloading torrents then you're going to suffer. The only way I got better speeds was by downloading via secure FTP from a server to my home and using multi threaded downloads, I guess it confuses their throttling software to a degree, or just wait until non peek times. I remember during the week that usually at exactly 11pm the speeds would change.

    I ended up going with BT Infinity because their is no contention ratio and what you get is what you get and the ping is also much better than on VM so now more high pings during peeks times which suited me for gaming purposes. BT Infinity has been excellent and the router supplied is good, have been a happy bunny ever since.

    Sorry if none of this helped lol

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    After all that's been written about VM and their "tactics" on a plethora of forums (including VMs).......I am surprised so many still get suckered into their claims about speeds and risk this whole debacle that is due to their refusal to upgrade infrastructure in any semi-decent time-frame. For at least 10 years now VM has been nothing short of a daily postcode lottery.

    People seem to have a problem including broadband when they use the phrase "You get what you pay for"
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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    Quote Originally Posted by Harkin View Post
    Hey watercooled. I didn't read all the posts in this thread but I did read alot. Having been on VM and having experience of the same kinda problem I learnt it was just down to speed throttling/packet shaping or whatever they want to call it.

    Basically during busy peak times they throttle the speeds in busy areas so that the bandwidth gets shared out. That's why you'll see that it happens at peak times but if you try the same thing at about 1am it will generally be perfect. And if you speak to VM they'll never admit that as a 'fault' because it's part of the service. The contention ratios on VM is what kills it so if you have a bunch of people in your hood that like downloading torrents then you're going to suffer. The only way I got better speeds was by downloading via secure FTP from a server to my home and using multi threaded downloads, I guess it confuses their throttling software to a degree, or just wait until non peek times. I remember during the week that usually at exactly 11pm the speeds would change.

    I ended up going with BT Infinity because their is no contention ratio and what you get is what you get and the ping is also much better than on VM so now more high pings during peeks times which suited me for gaming purposes. BT Infinity has been excellent and the router supplied is good, have been a happy bunny ever since.

    Sorry if none of this helped lol
    Yeah a couple of us over at VM forums have speculated it's probably due to congestion combined with aggressive QoS causing the single-thread issues, however some routes are not as badly affected, so it's possible the QoS system takes traffic a few hops ahead into account too. As I think I've said before though, it really wouldn't bother me if I was getting slower but reasonable single-thread performance, but now it's frequently at or below 5Mb (yes bits, not bytes) at peak times; web page load performance gets very poor and packet loss in games and VoIP gets very high.

    Quote Originally Posted by shaithis View Post
    After all that's been written about VM and their "tactics" on a plethora of forums (including VMs).......I am surprised so many still get suckered into their claims about speeds and risk this whole debacle that is due to their refusal to upgrade infrastructure in any semi-decent time-frame. For at least 10 years now VM has been nothing short of a daily postcode lottery.

    People seem to have a problem including broadband when they use the phrase "You get what you pay for"
    Not surprisingly, the congestion problems seem to come in waves after the 'free upgrades' they don't have the capacity for, and yeah they take an unbelievably long time to actually fix anything with 'review date' after review date passing without action.

    Personally I didn't have a big problem with their peak-time throttling as it did seem to avoid problems like this occurring to some extent and encouraged people to do huge downloads off-peak.

    With the way it is now, you can ironically get close to full speed by torrenting so it pretty much defeats the object - I'm not sure why they seem to be doing QoS at layer 4 rather than layer 3 as it can just be bypassed by a lot of bandwidth-intensive applications. But then again, they wouldn't be able to brag about their speedtest.net results if they did it properly! That's what's important after all.

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    DDY
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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    For what it's worth; in the last year VM said they'll be upgrading my broadband speed by April 2016, that's now. Five months prior, my connection was pretty much dead during peak hours which took VM four months to fix. Now, with a connection that works near enough full speed (50mbps plan) during peak times, the upgrade has been pushed forward to April 2017. Which if I may say so, seems to corroborate with the idea that VM's rolling out network congesting upgrades.

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    If you're getting a solid 50Mb and decent single-thread speeds then you're probably lucky they've put it off - you'd only be going up to 70Mb, and that's a one-off offer so if you change your package you'd be back down to 50 anyway. And 50 that works is better than 70 that rarely achieves close to that!

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    Amazingly and I don't mean to rub salt etc, after VM fixed what ever needed fixing, my connection can now manage a solid 6.0MB/s single thread HTTP download during peak times. Latency has been more or less consistent throughout the day too.

    From the things I've read, I'm honestly worried that it won't stay this way.

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    TBH Virgin has had the odd period of congestion but over something like 10 years since we started on 2Mb/s it's been pretty solid for most of it. I mean we had relatively frequent problems with power levels as we're fairly far away from the cabinet, but recent access network upgrades brought new amplifiers and tap banks so the RF side has been great lately. I'm just wondering what the motivation was for the new equipment - maybe DOCSIS 3.1 support?

    I'm just wondering if the Liberty Global buyout has had a negative influence on some parts of the company.

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    Quote Originally Posted by DDY View Post
    Amazingly and I don't mean to rub salt etc, after VM fixed what ever needed fixing, my connection can now manage a solid 6.0MB/s single thread HTTP download during peak times. Latency has been more or less consistent throughout the day too.

    From the things I've read, I'm honestly worried that it won't stay this way.
    Yep, like mentioned above they seem to sort the issue out eventually but then they bring out a higher speed or free upgrades etc and then you'll be struggling for the next 6 months again. I didn't mind the throttling that much but rather the high ping that messed with my gaming at times when it was really bad. And yeah torrenting was unaffected lol..no wonder there was so much congestion cos that's the thing they need to slow down during peek times

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    Over at the VM forums it seems we've found what appears to be a link between affected connections - we're all on CMTS with a Riverdelta (probably Motorola) MAC address. I wonder if anyone following this thread could check so we have some more data points? E.g. just post whether you're affected or not, and what CMTS brand you're on.

    To find the MAC, if you're on a Superhub 3 you can look in the network logs. On the superhub 2 I think you have to be in modem mode and look in ARP tables of your router.

    Thanks!!

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    Oh just to add, you don't have to post the CMTS MAC address, just put the first six digits into something like this and post the vendor: http://www.macvendorlookup.com/

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    CMTS ? Is that WAN (Modem) MAC Address ?

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    The CMTS is basically the kit at Virgin's end of the line which talks to your modem. It's different to the modem's WAN MAC address.

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    Re: Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

    Virgin Media slows down during evening for me but fine any other time

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