Virgin internet doing my head in!

[GSte]

We switched to Virgin about 4 months ago. We have the up to 8MB service. The problem is that although this sounds like a good speed, in actuality at peak times it is unbelievably slow..... we have a network and mainly use it for gaming, but games where the average ping of the first 50 servers is normally 62, shoot up to 250 at peak times making them unplayable. I've read that this is because Virgin don't rent enough pipes from BT.... surely this isn't the same with all broadband companies is it?

I live in the Bolton area.... are there any better companies we could switch to? BE broadband is now available here.....

Thanks for any help

[bomber999]

get rid of virgin asap, they are pants! BE would be a wise choice as they offer super fast speeds! im with freedom 2 surf, and they are reasonable, 50gb cap a month and i get pings of 15-30, mainly around 18ms on cs:s

[merdat]

If everybody ditched virgin and went to BE then BE would have the same high ping rates that Virgin has at peak times. At the end of the day the 'FAT PIPE' wins. This is going to be an ongoing problem for service providers as the Broadband demand increases in this country. They are going to have to keep an eye on their 'ratios' as they are flooded with waves of orders at every 'new deal'

[bomber999]

yeah its stupid with 50:1 ratio's, and if everyone is downloading your not going be happy! but if everyone left virgin and went to BE im sure BE would invest in new pipes asap, unlike virgin who want as many people paying without much thought to the poor service people will be getting!

[adam1701]

get BE,

they are good for games.... low pings etc.

[GSte]

Thanks a lot for the advice... am going to switch to BE, even though Virgin will charge me £50 for the pleasure.....

[htid]

Hmm just found this thread. I'm getting annoyed with Virgin too! Been with NTL for 3 years which is fine. Now it's turned to Virgin...I get sooooooo slow speeds. Internet speed tests (not sure how reliable they are) say my dl speed is 0.1mb/s even thought we pay for 10mb!!

I'm on wireless but it's silly, my housemate who's comp is further away from the router than mine, get's around 3.2! Anyone know why I should be getting really low compared to him?

[Splash]

What speed does your router connect at? How about if you connect your PC via ethernet to the router - what are your speeds like then? I ask as the fact that someone else using your connection gets much faster speeds suggest that the issue is not with the connection. Also I'm pretty sure that you pay for up to 10Mbps, which is contended. You sure your housemate isn't maxing out the connection with bittorrent or similar? Is the connection secure (ie nobody else is using it)?

[Steve B]

htid do you have the silver ntl:home modem?
if so type 192.168.100.1 <admin/admin> and it should take you to the router configuration screen

in there somewhere should be your speed settings, operation configuration maybe

[htid]

Not sure...it's in my housemates room and we aren't on speaking terms at the mo, he's being a...something bad

See like now, taking 3 mins just to load any webpage, and many are just timing out! It's not peak time, I don't get it!

*edit* I'm connected to the router at 67% signal strength. That's not exactly bad I didn't think

[htid]

What speed does your router connect at? How about if you connect your PC via ethernet to the router - what are your speeds like then? I ask as the fact that someone else using your connection gets much faster speeds suggest that the issue is not with the connection. Also I'm pretty sure that you pay for up to 10Mbps, which is contended. You sure your housemate isn't maxing out the connection with bittorrent or similar? Is the connection secure (ie nobody else is using it)?

Yeah I do think it's something with my pc...although my other housemates speeds also seems slow. Oh well. I know we pay UP to 10mb...but 0.1mb/s is just taking the..you know. My housemate's are dl stuff on bittorrent but nothing big, and only a few files at 25kb/s.

As for connecting directly, I was planning to do that to try, but what do I need? Something like this?

[Rev_Hill]

For all those having problems on Virgin.net with 8 meg:

Give them a call and tell them you have very high pings although you have good connection speeds. You basically want to play games.

They will 'regrade' you to a 2 meg line and what they don't tell you is that they will also change your streaming from IP to Data or vice versa.

I was told to then request a regrade back to 8 meg at the end of March when their hardware upgrade is scheduled to be completed.

My ping times are now very low and stable and have no problems at all.

Obviously not so good for downloading but happy to have this short term problem rather than no on-line gaming.

Rev

[Splash]

what are your housemates uploading at? If they haven't limited their upload in their client then chances are this is your issue - without going too in depth you need an amount of upstream free in order to make the most of the downstream. What router do you use? If it has a 4 port switch built in (as most have) then you just need a standard ethernet cable long enough and plug it into your PC's NIC, and the port on the switch. The cable you linked would be fine if you needed 20m...

As for Rev_Hill's comment above - they "change your streaming from IP to data or vice versa" - what? How do you think your data is transmitted and recieved if not via tcp/ip? Methinks their 1st line support are making stuff up...

If on ADSL and you found ADSLMax problematic some ISPs offered to un-Max your line, putting you back as you were before essentially - I suspect this is what they meant.


Something to try might be to open a command prompt and type

ping 194.168.4.100 -t

then press enter. Let it run for a minute or so and post the results here - this is one of the Virgin.net DNS servers, so should give you a good idea as to the stability of your connection (ie do you get a pretty constant result, or are they all over the place?). Once that's done try

tracert 194.168.4.100

then press enter, and post the results here.

[Rev_Hill]

Whatever they did during the regrade it certainly worked. They said something about changing the streaming and IP / Data as only one had the issue and the other was okay??? Can't you tell I'm really techy

They blamed it all on hardware upgrades.

As said I would do the regrade and then ask to be regraded to the 8 meg after March.

Rev

[Splash]

Yeah, the comment wasn't aimed at you Rev, more at whoever told you it...

[Rev_Hill]

Irish support guy.