Virgin Media poor (and worsening) download speed

[watercooled]

Well the tech just came out and, as is typical for this problem, all seemed reasonably OK while he was here!! He checked everything on the RF side, even put a line tester on our cable drop, checked for any corrosion on the cable, etc and couldn't find anything wrong.

Then, about 15 minutes after he left, more T4 timeouts on the upstream an dropped a channel again...

With regards to the speeds, he gave me the same line as tech support - that VM only acknowledge speedtest.net and don't pay attention to speeds of anything else. Which is nice, as all I like to do all day long is run speed tests and look at the results!

However, we also got a letter through the post today informing us of some maintenance work next week - funny how they have maintenance work scheduled when there's NOTHING WRONG WITH THE NETWORK!!! So I guess I'll see if that changes anything, and take it from there. I do wonder why no-one at tech support claimed to know anything about any ongoing or planned maintenance work when I asked them? I also wonder why one (UK based) phone tech support operative claimed they had their own internal speed test which showed my line as OK, but everyone I've spoken to since doesn't seem to know wof its existence, and/or says they just rely on customers' speed test results...

[GoNz0]

Fed up now, 2nd tech came out and put me up on a more powerful tap so my near perfect 0db downstream is now 4db (I fitted a 3db attenuator now) and it seems to have made matters worst.
Forum support noticed my upstreams 16QAM not 64QAM so it is falling back due to signal issues and guess what. They don't know why.

I wonder how many days until a reply this time, I am going to phone up and ask for this month's rental back as compensation.

[watercooled]

It's just so massively irritating to keep getting told there's nothing wrong when there clearly is, and how the variable nature of the problem means tech don't get to see it at its worst. I just can't believe how utterly idiotic it is that they will only acknowledge speedtest.net as an indicator of connection quality, and next to no-one I've spoken to besides the forum staff and 2nd line tech support even know what I'm going on about when I mention single vs multi thread downloads.

Also irritating is the fact it's taking a week or more per reply on the forums, despite the fact newer threads are getting answered relatively quickly.

Seems like VM would rather bury their heads in the sand and hope the problem magically goes away rather than daring to contact the people who would be able to actually investigate it.

I'm not sure but I think the Android speedtest app must limit the number of threads it uses because at very low traffic periods e.g. early morning I can occasionally hit upwards of 50Mb on my Nexus 4 over 802.11n, but the everyday speed is quite solid at 30Mbps, so much so I thought either my phone or access point were broken for a while. But of course I better not even mention WiFi to tech support, even as a separate issue, as fully expect them to latch on to that as an excuse for everything.

[GoNz0]

Both TV boxes packed up today so I rang for a 3rd flipping time to log it, told an engineer will be with me tomorrow followed by a text cancelling it saying a faults being fixed.

Needless to say they fixed bugger all but yet again no engineer coming.

[watercooled]

Yep, had that happen to me more than once - fix a fault in the area and blanket-cancel all appointments.

And more recently, the first time I booked an engineer I had to reschedule as I got called into work, so I went on the website only to find the weird system would only allow me to skip like a full week at a time so I couldn't choose, say, the next couple of days. And after choosing the next week, I got a text message on the original appointment day saying they'd be there later and to text NO if I couldn't make it so I replied as I thought it had neglected to cancel the first one or something, but I checked on the website later and found it had cancelled it altogether.

Plus their forum software seems to be broken as, when I'm typing it keeps moving my text cursor back a few lines for some strange reason when I'm in the middle of a sentence.

[GoNz0]

same here with the forum bug.

[watercooled]

Ughhh.

So after the complains team calling me back while I was out, they arranged to call back at 11am this morning. Still waiting. So I've just called retentions as I didn't hear an option for the complaints team and asked if I could follow it up and after a discussion she transferred me to a particularly unhelpful level 1 tech support rep who gave me some nonsense about some 'fault' being fixed, and then not fixed, and then fixed 24h from now, and that he would also send some magical signals to my modem which would make my speeds better, and that I'd have to reboot both my modem and PC precisely one hour from now so they matched settings.

Anything I said about people in the same area having the exact same issue seemed to go in one ear and back out of the other, so I just humoured him and ended the call. I might try again and see if I can get through to level 2 tech support, but as the letter says work is being done on Monday it might be worth waiting until then. Still, no-one I've spoken to seems to know anything about this scheduled work or what fault it's supposed to be fixing.

I mean the lady at retentions did listen to me but admitted she couldn't help me on the faults side of things, but it was a complete waste of time to transfer me to a tech support rep reading from a script and making up stories about faults which either exist or don't, and mystical signals which can make those faults go away...

[watercooled]

Update:

Against my better judgement I phoned back again and asked for line 2 tech support, he went to ask his manager and said they are not allowed to transfer people to level 2, only to speak to them themselves. Funny that, considering I've spoken to them twice already...

Anyway, he said he'd do his best to help and again, against my better judgement, I gave him a chance. Went through the usual script and after 30 mins on the phone he wanted to book another technician so I just refused as we've already had one out who didn't resolve anything, and I'm not taking more time off work or wasting my time off sitting in waiting for him to turn up and say there's nothing he can do again.

I know I keep repeating myself but how the heck can I (and several people on the same CMTS complaining on the forums) be getting sub 10Mbps speeds at peak times, a load of upstream timeouts and have no faults showing on their 'system'?? Oh how I'd love Openreach or another competitor to offer >100Mb/s services for a reasonable price! I'd also love to see Speedtest stop aiding the ISPs by showing purely multi-threaded results - no wonder it's the only one VM care about!!

Edit: Oh and I was asked to do a traceroute and pings to www.virginmedia.com, which made me facepalm as it doesn't respond to ICMP, so the fact it was timing out alarmed the rep, who didn't seem to understand when I tried to explain it had probably just been disabled by the web host rather than being a fault in itself.

[DDY]

I've been having issues with VM for the last few months myself, during peak times my pings would rocket and drop packets, on some occasions I'd lose so many packets my internet connection essentially dies for half an hour.

I reported the issue on the VM forums in January, to which I've been told there's a known fault that's "due for review on 30/03/16". In other words, I have to put up with for three months, if it gets fixed on review.

As a gesture of goodwill, I've been credited about £20 for the downtime, which was appreciated. But being told to wait three months for a fix still sucks.

[watercooled]

There hasn't even been a fault identified in my case, and according to tech support, traffic on the local node is 'very low' so it's likely not just a node problem, but they don't seem remotely willing to dig deeper than that. Either that or they're aware it's a more major problem and aren't prepared to admit it and have people across the region start complaining about it.

As I think I said before, a few people in the same general area but a few miles away are reporting the exact same problem, at the same time, and achieving pretty much the same speeds (regardless of package) when it strikes. But no-one in faults will acknowledge there's an obvious pattern.

I'm not sure if it's all related but on the speed sub-forum, there seem to be an AWFUL lot of people complaining of similar extremely low speeds when it strikes, with download being considerably slower than upload - more than I recall seeing in the past. As myself and a few people have been speculating over on the VM forums, it seems an awful lot like congestion and/or botched QoS configuration somewhere deeper in the network. I understand QoS (distinct from throttling) is a completely normal/desirable thing on any large-scale network* but if it's not done properly it could easily cause problems like this.

*Reason being, if all traffic was treated with completely equal priority, saturated links would mean low-bandwidth but high-priority traffic like gaming, VoIP, etc could suffer massively while bulk downloads consumed most of the bandwidth, which is pointless. It makes complete sense to at least try to ensure real-time traffic is prioritised as a bit of extra delay and packet loss barely matters for TCP downloads but can easily be catastrophic for real-time applications - having downloads drop in speed by a bit isn't going to upset many people (and even if it has to drop by a lot in the case of exceptionally high traffic isn't catastrophic provided it's short-term) but broken voice/lagging in a game is going to seriously annoy people.

Things like this do seem to get noticeably worse after the 'free speed boosts', which apparently means VM handing out higher customer speeds on their already saturated network and then scratching their heads when it starts falling apart.

[DDY]

To be fair, my VM connection has fallen apart and I haven't even received the free speed boost yet.

[GoNz0]

To be fair, my VM connection has fallen apart and I haven't even received the free speed boost yet.

You won't as they don't do it for those who need a new modem until they complain.

[Dareos]

0dB on downstream isnt perfect. the range is between -6 and +10, anything in between here is fine. 2dB would actually be optimum but difference is negligible

[Dareos]

going to be a while before i return to work folks, sorry i cant be of use

[Smudger]

You won't as they don't do it for those who need a new modem until they complain.

This has piqued my interest...

My 'Speed Boost' has apparently been coming for about a year now, but keeps getting put back. When I went onto my VM page last week, it said 'your speed boost is complete, you are now getting 100mbps!'. Thing is, I was already on 100mbps. I went onto chat and asked what it meant, they didn't know, but offered me an upgrade to 200mpbs for £6 a month and £9.99 for a new Superhub 2ac router. Now, if I go and check 'when am I getting my speed boost', it tells me July-September 2016...
I might give them a call...

[watercooled]

One thing to bear in mind is that this round of 'free speed boosts' is only for existing contracts - it doesn't necessarily carry across if you make any package changes, and some of those 'free upgrade' speeds are not available to new customers e.g. 70 and 150.

But yeah I saw that message despite no upgrade at the time too, which I think was because we'd made package changes and were not informed of this at the time.

Interestingly, I noticed the new packages have slightly different speed caps if you look in 'operation configuration' in your modem. E.g. the old '100Mbps' was 112640000 bps, the new one is 110100000 bps - the difference is pretty much negligible as far as speeds are concerned but it's possibly a handy way of knowing what package you're on.