Hi all. First post. This board seems like a great resource.
I have been having hell with my 10Mb connection for months.
A brief summary:
* Few months ago the connection would drop completely. Flashing lights on the Virgin box. Called Virgin, they scheduled an engineer. Problem corrected itself, but engineer turned up a few days later. He said "ahh, yes, it's because this area is over subscribed" and went off down the road to "change something". He came back and said that he had "moved" our connection to somewhere else. When I asked him if that would simply move the problem and make it worse for somewhere else he replied "yes".
* Past couple of months the latency has been terrible. Basic browsing of a non-graphic-heavy non-flash website can sometimes take MINUTES to load. Actual bandwidth is good and once the download of a file has actually begun can sometimes show up to 1MB/sec, it's just *getting* to the point where I can begin a download that's painful.
* Past week or two it's been even worse than above. Pings drop out consistently and connectivity is almost nil. I have had to resort to using a neighbour's connection.
I have emailed VM twice via the customer portal section of their site, using the contact us web form. I've had no response to my original email of 11 October, apart from the auto acknowledger. I have tried phoning, but after two occasions waiting over 15 minutes for someone to answer I gave up and resorted to the online form.
After some digging on here I found the mtr tool and downloaded and compiled it. Here are my results:
My
Code:
traceroute [v0.75]
mattebook-pro.local (0.0.0.0) Thu Oct 22 15:58:05 2009
Keys: Help Display mode Restart statistics Order of fields quit
Packets Pings
Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. 10.0.1.1 0.0% 44 1.2 1.5 0.8 4.4 0.8
2. 10.84.184.1 54.8% 43 8.1 12.1 7.7 21.3 3.9
3. osr01mort-v11.network.virginmedia.net 37.2% 43 9.3 18.9 8.2 173.4 31.3
4. osr01croy-tenge73.network.virginmedia.net 54.8% 43 12.6 23.8 8.9 171.9 37.5
5. bre-bb-a-ae2-0.network.virginmedia.net 55.8% 43 10.2 16.8 9.3 100.2 20.6
6. 213.43.163.105 50.0% 43 12.5 12.8 11.1 15.9 1.1
7. redb-ic-1-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net 54.8% 43 14.0 14.7 12.0 23.8 2.7
8. 212.58.239.249 47.6% 43 12.5 16.8 12.4 31.7 5.5
9. 212.58.238.133 41.5% 42 13.1 16.4 12.6 23.3 3.5
10. 212.58.239.58 50.0% 42 15.9 17.5 13.2 31.2 5.2
11. www-vip.telhc.bbc.co.uk 48.8% 42 17.1 17.8 13.9 35.5 5.3
compared to my neighbour's AOL connection:
mattebook-pro.local (0.0.0.0) Thu Oct 22 16:01:30 2009
Keys: Help Display mode Restart statistics Order of fields quit
Packets Pings
Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. ???
2. host-92-3-192-1.as43234.net 0.0% 67 18.8 19.8 17.1 28.1 1.8
3. 92.31.251.38 0.0% 67 17.6 21.4 17.6 118.2 12.3
4. xe-9-3-0-scr001.loh.as13285.net 0.0% 66 21.6 24.9 18.1 64.7 12.1
5. xe-11-0-0-scr010.sov.as13285.net 0.0% 66 18.9 24.0 18.0 87.2 12.1
6. bbc-pp-sov.as13285.net 0.0% 66 21.3 30.7 18.9 198.6 34.0
7. 212.58.238.149 0.0% 66 20.9 21.4 18.4 61.0 5.2
8. te12-1.hsw1.cwwtf.bbc.co.uk 0.0% 66 24.4 25.1 19.4 117.2 16.7
9. www-vip.cwwtf.bbc.co.uk 0.0% 66 22.9 22.5 20.4 32.0 2.2
It looks like the issue is quite high up the chain after leaving my Virgin modem. I'm gonna take the coax apart and give it all a good clean.
It's pretty obvious that there is something wrong with the connection. Does anyone have any tips for getting through to VM and getting them to acknowledge a problem?
Many thanks
Stuart
PS, I am in TW1
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