Apologies for the length of this post but this has been ongoing for 6 months now so theres quite a bit to cover.
Back in September when VM reduced the price of their 50mb package i upgraded my 20mb line to the new 50mb speed and have since then never had a fully working service. I reported the problems i was having (slowspeed and packetloss although pingtimes during the slowspeed packet loss were 15ms as if the line was idle) fairly soon after installing the line and have been in constant contact with VM since then and still havent had any luck finding a fix so im posting here to see how many people are having the same issue i am (ive seen several similar issues but nothing the same) and to see if anybody can offer any suggestion as to what i can do next.
When i was on 20mb i never had any problems with the line other than the odd outage that affected the whole area so i dont count those. Ever since moving to 50mb i get completely random periods lasting from a few minutes to several hours where my download speeds on newsgroups will drop to around 5mbps and 30-40% packetloss that stops any webpages from loading. if i cancel the download the packetloss goes away and i can brows the web with no problems. running a speed test from the internal virgin media speedtest site would most likely give a download speed of 50mb but again i wont be able to view any web pages due to packetloss. downloading some ubuntu images from the virgin ubuntu download directory ( i usually start 3 downloads to make sure the line is maxed) causes no other webpages to load ( sometimes i cant start the 3 downloads) and probably will cause the downloads to corrupt and the downloads complete well under the 690mb in size they should be.
I initially raised this to vm over the phone where they said my power levels were too high, i had 8-9db on the downstream at the time, the first engineer came out and said they couldnt find anything wrong.
I called back and vm sent out another engineer who this time replaced the modem and added a 6 and 10 db attenuator as this new modem was reporting power levels of 16-18db. this made no difference and the engineer at the time was lucky enough to see the problem happening while he was there so he passed this onto the priciple engineer for the area who came out for another visit.
She came out but again couldnt find anything wrong and said she would check some of their monitoring systems the next day to see if she could see any problems on the line.
she couldnt see anything wrong on the monitoring systems so came out again and this time made some changes in the cabinet to try to reduce the powerlevels so i wouldnt need the attenuators but couldnt reduce them enough to stop me from needing them. During this time i tried with an without the attenuators and having them on or off made no difference to the performance of the line.
The next step that vm did was to do a repull of the cable from the cabinet into my house, a week before this was due to be completed the line went hard down and an engineer came out and found a problem with the cable and did the repull early but this still didnt fix the problem.
I then escalated this past the principle engineer and was talking to the engineering manager for the area.
vm then found some issues with the fibre being dirty and requiring cleaning near the headend, this happened a couple of times but still no improvement in the line. next they found a fault with the headend itself and had to replace one of the cards there. again, still no improvement. during this time one of the network engineers in the area had also had a look at the line and was unable to see any problems when testing from the box in the street.
i also had some sort of filtering/monitoring device attached to the back of the modem at this time as well which was hoped would see where the problem was comming from but didnt help.
after this there was a period where i just left it as i'd gotten tired of constantly chasing this and getting nowhere but eventually i emailed Neil Berkett to intervene and he passed it to one of his high level complaints team.
from here vm found another issue with the fibre at the headend which had no effect, the power levels dropped marginally but not much.
I sent through a number of ping tests, trace routes and pathpings showing the packetloss i was getting and another engineer was sent to my house, this time it was one of the network engineers who had been looking at this line previously. he couldnt find any issue with the line again and it wasnt actually running badly when he was there which didnt help. he did find that the new modem i had was reporting bad power readings so he arranged for that to be swapped again. which was done a few days later.
the new modem didnt help still and the power levels were still a little high so vm did some work reducing those without me needing to use the attenuators and now my power levels hover between 0 and -1. the fluctuated up to 2 a few times while vm were running more tests on the line. i was still having problems with the speed and packetloss tho.
I then asked vm to downgrade my line to 20mb as i hadnt had any issues on that which they did although grudgingly. the line ran a lot better on 20mb, speeds still dropped sometimes but nowhere near as much as when it was on 50mb although the line was hard to test during the day due to the usage caps on 20mb. this was still on the 50mb modem running on docsis 3. i wanted vm to then reactivate my old modem so that i could test that and with docsis1 but they wouldnt do that.
then i had vm trying to fob me off stating that web pages would load slow when im maxing out the line however i went back to them with the fact that a, the webpages weren't loading slow, they weren't loading at all and b, im only downloading at 5mb when i get the packetloss. so they retracted those claims. they also tried to tell me it was slow when i was testing it on 20mb because i had hit the download cap which was also rubbish because a, it was at 8am and there was no cap at 8 am and b, when the lines capped ping times go through the roof but i dont get packetloss, when i have the problem ping times are low as if the line is idle (15ms) but theres high packetloss.
Ive spoken to the network engineer while the line was running slowly and he logged onto the ubr and ran some ping tests back to my modem which all came back with no loss and also some pings externally which all came back with no issues too. they have no reported congestion issues on this ubr and say they have no one else in the area with the same problem i am having.
Testing i have done my side to eliminate my equipment is testing from 2 seperate pcs, both directly into the modem and via the virgin supplied router. one pc is running xp, the other windows 7. i have tested with 100mb ethernet and 1gb ethernet over cat5e and cat6 cables.
Something i have noticed while troubleshooting this is if i reboot the modem then theres a very good chance the line will run poorly just after it reconnects although generally only for a short time around 5 mins.
This is currently being looked at by vm's INMC team to check the routing but im really not sure what i can do next if they also say nothing is wrong.
If anyone can provide some suggestions of where to take this next id be very grateful or if anyone else can confirm that they're also having the same issues. if its any use this is in the CR2 area.
Ive got lots and lots of pictures and logs of pings, traceroutes and path pings ill include a couple to look at. i think thats everything but if you have any questions let me know.
router logs
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