Virgin bandwidth dropping at the end of the month?

[Ekreed]

This will need a little explaining I think. I've got the virgin media 'L' or 10mbps package and two months in a row I have had problems at the end of the month. On the last day of november and october I found my internet impossible to use, according to speedtest.net my ping reached >5000ms and my upload speed struggled to get above 0.01mbps.
At first I thought it may have been a connection trouble, irritating but I could live with it, but now it has happened twice on the last day of the month I find it more suspicious. Especially since the trouble cleared up once the next month started after midnight. Do virgin have some form of monthly limit on bandwidth that I am exceeding, after which they throttle your line? I have looked up their terms and conditions and their traffic management policy shouldn't apply to when I was experiencing problems, and there should be no reason why it should happen only on the last day of the month since it seems to use daily limits.
Anyone have any idea what is going on? I tried contacting virgin about it but they haven't replied.
(I can post links to the speedtests later if it will help, I don't have them right now since I'm not at home)

[shbris]

where do you live? my virgin package has been absolutely sh*te for last 2 days, 2500ms pings all over the shop (bristol)

virgin use a daily quota which you can find on internet www.google.co.uk

as far as any 'unofficial' monthly limit, entirely possible. what kind of volumes do you download?

[Ekreed]

I don't tend to download that much, but I share the connection with two other people and between us we play a lot of games online, me on steam and them on xbox live. I guess it would average to about 5 hours of online gaming a day on my connection between us. I've never had problems this severe with virgin before, some days it would go slow in my old house at peak times, but it never ended up unusable. I live in Cardiff by the way.

[shbris]

online gaming is more about low latency, the actual bandwidth used works out as much less than 50MB per hour, so that shouldn't cause a problem

try turning off modem overnight see if it helps reset it

[Mista157]

Apparently Virgin have had a lot of problems with their network recently. My 20mb connection was rock solid up until six weeks ago, now speeds fluctuate dramatically between 6mb and 20mb averaging out at around 10mb.
My 12 month contract is up in a couple of weeks, time to call retentions I think...

[Ekreed]

Yeah, I think it must just be network troubles, since the same thing happened to me on thursday night, I guess it must have just been a coincidence that the previous two times were the last days of the month. Is it likely the connection issue is on the line into my house, since I have other friends in the area who do not experience such problems? Maybe the cabling is loose and doesn't hold up well when it's cold, or something.

[Mista157]

I'm wondering whether all the heavy rainfall of the past few weeks has caused an issue?

I know what will happen if I do call Virgin, "Unplug you modem and wait 30 seconds", "There's no fault on your line", etc, etc....

[Terbinator]

I download at 24Mb/s so ignore the DL figure, but ping wise ive got no complaints. Maybe its just in certain areas, i know they did have problems with TV and internet here (Mancland) about 2 weeks ago but even that didn't effect my Tv/Internet personally.

[Ekreed]

I am wondering if it is weather conditions that are affecting it, that would explain why it is so erratic. Usually I get speeds like the top result (todays), but a week ago today my result was the one below. I just don't know why it is dropping so randomly. How hard is it to get them to send out an engineer to inspect the line?




edit: also, I got this result last night, not quite as bad since I could just about use the internet, but nowhere near what I am paying for.

[Jay]

This is why I got rid of them, they badly over sub and there is no doubt a case for someone to take them to court

[Tomahawk]

I've got 20Mb broadband from them and its been great ..except for constant reboots required of the modem due to the line dropping and losing DNS/IP! Then all of a sudden in the last week my download speeds grinded to a halt and dropped to ~0.25Mb... so I had to ring them and they confirmed there was a fault with my line. An engineer came round today and just swapped out the modem for a new one! So hopefully this has solved the problem, but we'll see!

It's strange though as I read on the Virgin forums that a lot of people are having problems with their 20Mb connections dropping to ~0.25Mb (and not because they've been downloading hugely!) recently.

[Speed]

Here is the official link for the limits: http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php

Personally I'm happy to live with it, theres no way I could get 20M/bit speeds in this area from anything other than cable broadband.

It is unlimited between 21:00 and 10:00 and 15:00 and 16:00 for all but the lowest package.

[Druff]

I have been getting strange issues for the last couple of weeks maybe more between 9-12 when I used to download loads I now get around 10mbit connection max then it speeds up after 12. Been with them for a few months now and had no issues until now. Becoming a real pain specialy when I am keeping within there cap guidelines.

[Mista157]

Well my connection seems to have perked up:-


I'll try it again this evening to see if contention is my problem.

[Grey M@a]

I will bet its something to do with the console players I have a 360 myself and a PC for gaming. I can pull down gigs worth of data from steam if I buy a game or the usual 1gb+ for a 360 demo as it seems to be the case atm. Even on the 20mb line we are capped as soon as we hit 3gb in an evening so that could be a demo or two and a purchase etc and you get capped.

Your upload is a little below par for a capped line though. You will find though they seriously over sub the lines. I am lucky enough that most the street round my way have all gone Sky/BT with one or two of us going cable.

Although saying this, when the line is shared there are two laptops, two PC's, a 360 and a PS3 hammering the line at times and we barely get throttled. I tend to set demo downloads off in the early hours of the day.

Also remember that although virgin say its unlimited at certain time periods, if you hit your throttle limit of say 3GB for example a minute before the cut off period you are still capped for 4 hours I think it is. This is what catches people out as they think as soon as 9pm hits all throttling is dropped but in reality you hit your limit at 8:59pm you are still throttled for the 4 hours.

[piggeh]

My connection for web pages and bittorrent went massively down, so much so it was unusable (I'm talking about downloading at maybe 10kb/s and webpages taking ages to load). But when I tried online gaming or streaming video, both worked ok.