Virgin Media 50Mb Broadband Update
By nick | Personal, Uncategorized30 Mar 2010
Now on my fourth month with Virgin Media 50Mb Broadband and I’m starting to notice problems popping up more frequently. For the last 24 hours I’ve been suffering from huge packet loss, this is ranging from 10-35%.
Packet loss is a nasty thing and makes everything feel as if I’m on a slower than dial up connection as websites failed to load with lots of the data going missing.
At this point I’m still trying to figure out the problem although accept it’s more than possible that the poor quality cable modem (connected to a FreeBSD 8 Hardware Router) is to blame. I’ve had packet loss on the connection a fair few times now although this usually sorted it self out after a couple of minutes.
I’m still enjoying the connection speeds, even in peak times I’m still able to download at over 6MB/s which makes me a very happy geek and it’s not all about downloading either. The huge upstream bandwidth makes my little home server much more useful and being connection to a VPN whilst working away, I’m thankful to be a Virgin Media 50Mb customer — although there’s always room for improvement.
Update:
After leaving the cable modem powered off for 30 mins it seems the problem has been resolved. This could be a coincidence although I think the chances are slim. Does this mean the modem sucks or does cable do some sort of syncing stuff behind the scenes the same way BT/ADSL do? Either way I’m happy to have my connection back!
64 bytes from 209.85.229.147: icmp_seq=375 ttl=52 time=20.178 ms
64 bytes from 209.85.229.147: icmp_seq=376 ttl=52 time=21.440 ms
64 bytes from 209.85.229.147: icmp_seq=377 ttl=52 time=22.574 ms
64 bytes from 209.85.229.147: icmp_seq=378 ttl=52 time=21.680 ms
— google.com ping statistics —
379 packets transmitted, 379 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 19.802/22.691/95.664/5.645 ms
Update 2:
So it didn’t last too long before things decided to go crappy again. I’m still seeing far too many packets go into a black hole. It seems some other Virgin Media customers have been suffering from this problem over the past couple of months, I’ve also learned that there’s little to no point attempting to get technical help from Virgin Media themselves, they are apparently only good to follow their on screen instructions and are unable to use any initiative.. I guess that’s what the future has to offer.