Virgin media incredibly poor speeds, way to prove it?

[Hicks12]

Well for like the past 2 weeks ive been getting crap speeds during evenings, its very unstable and ranges from like 0.2mb to 4mb. I can notice this with slow loading times of webpages and inability to play games online cause i lag people out!. Ive used speedtest.net to check speeds but is there any better way to check this? Because am obviously going to complain to VM but they tend to fob me off so would like to know if i could test the speeds from say, there website?.

Anyone else noticed these poor speeds aswell?

Thanks for any help.

[watercooled]

Now you come to mention it I have been getting poor speeds in the evenings lately - down to about 2-3 meg. One thing you could do is go to http://192.168.100.1 (your cable modem) and check your connection stats to see if there's anything wrong with your connection. SNR - the higher the better, above 33dB is good IIRC, downstream power level should ideally be 0dBmV but I think up to 8 either way (plus or minus) is OK, up to 15 is acceptable but should really be seen to. Upstream power, the lower the better, should between +8dBmV and +53dBmV.

[Hicks12]

Ok well this is what it says:

SNR- 39dB
Powerlevel :4dB(downstream)

Upstream
Powerlevel: 46 dBmV

Looking at the logs there seems to be ALOT of problems!.
For reference:
Time : Priority :Code :Message
1970-01-01 00:00:48 3-Critical 0x040D9A2C DHCP WARNING - Non-critical field invalid in response.
1970-01-01 00:00:39 3-Critical 0x04E33A10 Received Response to Broadcast Maintenance Request, But no Unicast Maintenance opportunities received - T4 timeout
1970-01-01 00:00:06 3-Critical 0x04E33948 No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out
1970-01-01 00:00:11 3-Critical 0x040D9A2C DHCP WARNING - Non-critical field invalid in response.
1970-01-01 00:00:14 3-Critical 0x040D9964 DHCP FAILED - Discover sent, no offer received
1970-01-01 00:00:13 3-Critical 0x040D9A2C DHCP WARNING - Non-critical field invalid in response.
1970-01-01 00:00:40 3-Critical 0x04E33A10 Received Response to Broadcast Maintenance Request, But no Unicast Maintenance opportunities received - T4 timeout
1970-01-01 00:00:07 3-Critical 0x04E33948 No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out
2009-11-30 10:20:24 3-Critical 0x040D9A2C DHCP WARNING - Non-critical field invalid in response.
2009-11-30 10:20:22 3-Critical 0x040D99C8 DHCP FAILED - Request sent, No response
2009-11-30 10:18:13 3-Critical 0x040D9964 DHCP FAILED - Discover sent, no offer received
2009-11-30 10:17:55 3-Critical 0x04E33948 No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out
2009-11-30 10:17:45 3-Critical 0x04E339AC Init RANGING Critical Ranging Request Retries exhausted
2009-11-30 10:17:45 3-Critical 0x04E33948 No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out
2009-11-30 10:17:08 3-Critical 0x0501BDC8 SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to acquire FEC framing
2009-11-30 10:17:00 3-Critical 0x0501BD64 SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to acquire QAM/QPSK symbol timing


VM lines for support appear closed so will call tomorrow but im guessing its over subscribing in the area? Thing is that my mate is just down the road from me and is getting perfect speeds on VM same package, 10mb.

Confused!".

[watercooled]

Those signal levels look fine and those error messages aren't anything to worry about so it doesn't look like it's just something wrong with your connection. It's likely that VM has over-subscribed your area so when lots of people go online and start downloading it saturates the connection so your download speed suffers. How long has it been like that for?

[Hicks12]

Probably about 2 weeks, thats when its been noticably bad.
My connection is ok at about 12ish but it is from like 4pm to now every night!.

My upload speed is always fine so its just download thats being utter crap, i love how VM boast about good speeds and reliable connection and yet it isnt anymore, even at times when they throttle everyone.

I do think it was like for a month though tbh, havent been using pc much as ive had glandular fever so was in bed, but the websites could be slow for like 5minutes and then speed up so it was unreliable but not so constant that it didnt really pop into my head ha.

[watercooled]

Oh no VM uses fibre-optic cable to you house so it can't be that!!
Just kidding, and besides it's coax they use from the cabinet to your house (sorry been on the phone to them...again, just had to get that off my chest )
No, no matter what they like customers to believe the cable network is by no means more reliable than ADSL - yeah with DSL your speed depends on distance from the exchange but provided you're with a half-decent provider who doesn't over-subscribe connections then you pretty much always get a consistent speed - unlike cable...
Along with most people on cable I wish there was some competition in the cable market again!!!!!!

[Jay]

download from their ftp servers and record your speeds then let them know.

[Hicks12]

I just did a pathping to bbc and this is what i got

IIRC i used to get solid 0% all the time, now i dont...

I tried their download bit and i got 80-170KB, poor.
Link to test: ftp://ftp.virginmedia.com/blueyonder...h/ifhsetup.exe

[watercooled]

Same here, my speed was fine a few hours ago but I'm getting less than 2Mbps now...

Considering I normally get <20ms ping and about 9.8 Mbps download on speedtest:



And another thing, DNS resolution time seems far greater than normal too...

[Grey M@a]

What line speed are you on? I am on a 20mb line and I could run the same tracert's or pings to the same sites you have so you can show them what a decent 20mb line gets. Right now I am hammering youtube and grabbing podcasts and my speed test still shows the line running around 17.8mb/s

[Hicks12]

Im on a 10mb line, since having this line(many years tbh) its been pretty solid and only had a problem for a week and that was cause i apparently downloaded to much and they kept me throttled to 2.5mb, i downloaded 10gb prior to this so it really shows how bad they are... was even downloaded during the night to!.

[Grey M@a]

When I get throttled, the 20mb lines go to a 5mb line effectively and I pretty much get the full 5mb to. Only time I suffer though is when I rebuild and I am grabbing all the patches etc and reinstalling steam games.

If you go to pingtest.net can you post your results from that to?

[Hicks12]

Em well now is a time where its OK but heres result:




Ping normally 15-19ms, used to get 9.7-9.9mb all the time... oh how its changing.

[shbris]

when you chat to virgin they'll ask for a tracert to bbc

in command, tracert www.bbc.co.uk

then copy it to send to them

[Hicks12]

Well i emailed them on thursday and still awaiting a reply, speeds still be poor in evenings (now!) maxing 3 mb during the time yesterday and today im getting about 4-5mb . I really want a discount on my internet if im going to be getting these poor speeds for any longer!.

I would move to O2 but that requires a bt line and then we would need to get tv with sky... my dad doesnt want the hassle of having individual companies for BB/Phone/TV and switching is more hassle especially with crap virgin!.

[1stRaven]

Your not the only one. Since the week before Christmas, our connection has been awful from mid afternoon until late night. I've rebooted the modem, our hardware firewall, ran a whole number of pings and trace routes but still cant find anything wrong on our side of things.

Main thing I have noticed is that our upload speed drops to 0.01mb/s to 0.08mb/s while our download speed is hovering around the 13-18mb/s (we are on the 20mb package)

From searching the net, there are quite a few people suffering this issue in various areas. Guess its time to suffer the Virgin Media support and find our whats going on.