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broadband woes

johnwhitfield

johnwhitfield

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As I’ve already taken the iron maiden thread too far off topic. I thought I would post my old man moan here.

Currently downloading the new game code and it’s actually a good day. Only 20 mins to go for the code download. 🤘paying £60 a month but getting roughly 10% of the advertised speed. (To be fair that’s plenty though if it was stable)

As I’ve got time on my hands I figured I’d try to work out why broadband round here is so ****.

First up the great engineering job with the box on our wall. Splicing God knows how many old cables into a damaged box must have struck different engineers over time as being a great labour saving technique.

Next up we have the genius invisible repair job Virgin performed after randomly cutting our cable and refusing to believe there was a problem as their system said everything was fine. At least it gives me comedy value watching school children trip over it.

Bizarely when it rains lots of people on our road have internet problems. I’m sure it’s entirely unconnected to the junction box being permanently open after it was hit by a car three years ago. I think it’s an especially nice touch that BT decided to repaint it this week though.

I also got a quote out of BT as they’ve now improved their service in the area. Not quite sure I’d describe it as lightning fast.

Apparently it’s partly down to insufficient capacity in the area so building flats for 30,000 more people at the bottom of the road can surely only help matters.
 

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Can you plug a laptop into the Virgin hub with an Ethernet cable and run a Speedtest? Knowing your house I think the walls are pretty radio unfriendly.

Goto fast.com

Neil


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
 
I used to have all sorts of issues with network contention on VM.... it would be fast out of hours... however at peak times i would be struggling with anything above 3 meg.. (this was on a 300Mb Service)...

Moved house and all issues went (After a 3 year battle with them)... They couldnt wait to get rid of me (Depite just wanting what i was paying for!). Now i'm elsewhere and VM are excellent!

Unfortunately most speedtest programs/sites are also crap and display inaccurate readings.... (single thread/Multithread etc) - Try this one and see how it goes... http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest?httpsok=0

Have you tried looking at all options in your area?? (https://availability.samknows.com/broadband/broadband_checker)
 
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I think the walls / build are the main problem with the WiFi. Downloading code requires me to stand right next to the hub.

I like that speed tester. Really easy to use.
I ran 6 or 7 tests. Speed ranged between 350 and 5 mbps. I’m assuming it shouldn’t vary quite so much.

the only cable round here is Virgin , so I’m guessing I’m stuck with them. If I lived 30 houses further down the road then I could get BT infinity but they’ve got no plans to extend it further at the moment. I got excited the other week as they were stuck in cables at the top of the road but it looks like that’s for the other side of the hill.
 
yeah for some reason we haven't built FTTC in your locale John so I think VIrgin is your only choice.

Have you seen any cabinets like this in your area?

thumbs_fibre_broadband_is_here_fttc_cabinet_long_image.jpg
 
Nope. Nothing so big (or as free of car smash dents 😉)

oh well at least I know what my go to moan is going to be for the next few years....
 
Virgin have the genius idea that you can only get compensation for the internet being down if you log it on their website. Problem is.....
 
They would save money if they didn't stick a notice on the box telling you the weather. I agree with Neil, always use wired/fibre connection to do tests.

BT won't do much cabinet work unless absolutely necessary. The Cabinet we are connected to has one faulty module and absolutely no spares so when we had a fault if the 3rd level support weren't able to fix it we would have been in the situation of waiting for council approval for a new cabinet or waiting for FTTP. FTTP is available near where we live but only a small test area and in some new builds.


David
 
DAFlippers said:
They would save money if they didn't stick a notice on the box telling you the weather. I agree with Neil, always use wired/fibre connection to do tests.

BT won't do much cabinet work unless absolutely necessary. The Cabinet we are connected to has one faulty module and absolutely no spares so when we had a fault if the 3rd level support weren't able to fix it we would have been in the situation of waiting for council approval for a new cabinet or waiting for FTTP. FTTP is available near where we live but only a small test area and in some new builds.


David
Click to expand...

Can you email me the correspondence on this please but that sounds like total BS. Neil@domino.org

Neil


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
 
johnwhitfield said:
As I’ve already taken the iron maiden thread too far off topic. I thought I would post my old man moan here.

Currently downloading the new game code and it’s actually a good day. Only 20 mins to go for the code download. 🤘paying £60 a month but getting roughly 10% of the advertised speed. (To be fair that’s plenty though if it was stable)

As I’ve got time on my hands I figured I’d try to work out why broadband round here is so ****.

First up the great engineering job with the box on our wall. Splicing God knows how many old cables into a damaged box must have struck different engineers over time as being a great labour saving technique.

Next up we have the genius invisible repair job Virgin performed after randomly cutting our cable and refusing to believe there was a problem as their system said everything was fine. At least it gives me comedy value watching school children trip over it.

Bizarely when it rains lots of people on our road have internet problems. I’m sure it’s entirely unconnected to the junction box being permanently open after it was hit by a car three years ago. I think it’s an especially nice touch that BT decided to repaint it this week though.

I also got a quote out of BT as they’ve now improved their service in the area. Not quite sure I’d describe it as lightning fast.

Apparently it’s partly down to insufficient capacity in the area so building flats for 30,000 more people at the bottom of the road can surely only help matters.
Click to expand...
What is it doing, is the wi-fi really slow, does it improve when you restart the router?

It might be noise on the line caused by the outside BNC connectors entering the property getting corroded. My in-laws had this issue and spent weeks arguing with me it was my Xbox, we lived there for a couple of weeks. Downloads speeds check out but WiFi misbehaves.

You can run some tests from the router, there a test menu that shows some graphs, but can't remember where. If you look on the web it should be at a certain level but can't remember exactly what.

Good luck arguing with the useless call center, ask to speak to a manager and get them to send an engineer out. They will try anything to stop one. They have been trained not to 😉
 
^^^^If you have completely ruled out your CPE. - VM HUB , your laptops, virus, etc..... speed tested direct into the HUB via Ethernet.

Have a look at the following diagram to give you an idea for your VM BB Cable setup:
Simply put - a protocol is used - Docsis that allows transmission of high bandwidth data transfer over the existing TV system.
At the Headend, you have the CMTS- Cable Modem Termination System.
Here you can bet your bottom dollar is where the oversubscribed data services will be occurring. The ISP (VM) will be juggling with customers cash on whether they will bother upgrading the Headend or not.
This may account for your differential service.

381CCA76-6ADA-49F4-8793-016E664C6285.jpeg
 
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johnwhitfield said:
I ran 6 or 7 tests. Speed ranged between 350 and 5 mbps. I’m assuming it shouldn’t vary quite so much.
Click to expand...

Variation so large is quite unusual. Did you plug the laptop directly into the Virgin router and disconnect all other connections from it (and turn off Wifi) and close all apps on the laptop before running the tests - if not, then it could have been internal usage saturating connection.

What time of day was that? If you have consistently faster connections early morning (say 5-7am) than the evening then that indicates a probable contention issue. If it randomly bounces from 350M to 5M all day, then you have a different issue.
 
johnwhitfield said:
I think the walls / build are the main problem with the WiFi. Downloading code requires me to stand right next to the hub.

I like that speed tester. Really easy to use.
I ran 6 or 7 tests. Speed ranged between 350 and 5 mbps. I’m assuming it shouldn’t vary quite so much.

the only cable round here is Virgin , so I’m guessing I’m stuck with them. If I lived 30 houses further down the road then I could get BT infinity but they’ve got no plans to extend it further at the moment. I got excited the other week as they were stuck in cables at the top of the road but it looks like that’s for the other side of the hill.
Click to expand...
As above - you need to determine whether it's the wifi or the connection. Plug in directly to the router and run a series of tests. Better (as above) if you remove everything else but I suspect that won't be your issue. Then if that's OK, put everything back in, stay connected and run a series of tests again. If all OK, then it'll be your wifi. Might be the box, might be the physical house build. Easiest way to tell is to run tests right next to the box on wifi, confirm whether 2G or 5G, test on both, and then test with another wifi option (like a second router if you have one or a WAP).
 
Yup. It was a high class repair when their morons randomly cut through the cable in June. Connectivity was rubbish long before that though.
 
^^^ Ah, righto, reason I ask was any copper that's constantly wet / connectors corroded won't be good.
Not sure how that would look inside that joint. BT uses gel connectors on their exposed copper joins.
As you said, the connection was bad before hand so.........

One you have ruled out all other CPE devices and done your speed tests via Ethernet.
- Has the speed always been crap on VM?
- Any of your neighbours on VM, if so how is their service?
- Has your Hub ever been swapped out, could have a fault?

Maybe get the HUB swapped out, if it doesn't resolve then I would suggest getting Virgin to task an engineer to check ALL the BNC terminations including that join.
Get them to also check the terminations at the outdoor grey box (similar to the BT green box)
 
Thanks for all the suggestions. The entire top end of the street has VM as it’s the only semi decent service available. We all regularly lose connection. If it only drops a couple of times a day I chalk that up as a win.
 
johnwhitfield said:
Thanks for all the suggestions. The entire top end of the street has VM as it’s the only semi decent service available. We all regularly lose connection. If it only drops a couple of times a day I chalk that up as a win.
Click to expand...

All at the same time, or randomly? Do you all have the same variable speed issues? If so, then it is probably where the signal is split our for local distribution.

The problem with most broadband issues is people don't understand how to 'test' properly to get meaningful results and so you get lots of 'Wifi is rubbish' assertions with no data to go on. Most issues (other than distance from the exchange!) can be resolved.

Also, many lines (more DSL as cable is less affected by this) will improve from about now as people take down all the horrid cheapo RF producing Christmas lights. We can tell from line noise graphs what time of year it is as Christmas lights tend to stay on all day and when they aren't being used, street lights are also often adding interference so you can tell when it starts at 4pm it is December and 10pm it is summer.
 
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