Rather slow

[Calliope]

Hi guys; my first time posting here.

I joined VM after they absorbed everyone, so I'm not ex-NTL or any of that stuff if that helps any.

I'm on the 20mbit package and have never had a problem with it til last Thursday/Friday when it started being insanely slow. I'm having trouble now downloading at anything more than 20kb/sec.

The strange part to me is that some sites (Fileshack is one, Valve's Steam service also works fine sometimes) are fine and I'll regularly download at several mbps from them, but others (Microsoft is one of them) I'm lucky if I scrape 30kbps.

I tried out the http://gamefiles.virginmedia.com/ link that I came across in one of the other posts and got well over 2mb/sec downloading from it.

Browsing is also insanely slow, taking a minute or more to load some webpages.

I'm on a home network, so I've tried connecting directly to the cable modem (with another machine, even) and encountered the exact same problem.

I'm in the Middlesbrough area, postcode TS4.

Speedtest:
https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2008/10/30.png

Modem stats:

Cable Modem : DOCSIS 1.0/1.1/2.0 Compliant

Downstream Lock : Locked
Downstream Channel Id : 41
Downstream Frequency : 402750000 Hz
Downstream Modulation : QAM256
Downstream Symbol Rate : 5360.537 Ksym/sec
Downstream Interleave Depth : taps32Increment4
Downstream Receive Power Level : 2.9 dBmV
Downstream SNR : 39.2 dB

Upstream Lock : Locked
Upstream Channel ID : 3
Upstream Frequency : 34000000 Hz
Upstream Modulation : QAM16
Upstream Symbol Rate : 2560 Ksym/sec
Upstream transmit Power Level : 47.0 dBmV
Upstream Mini-Slot Size : 2

Any help is much appreciated. :D

[xspeedyx]

If your downloading at full whack from gamefiles.blueyonder.co.uk then it could be a Virgin Media routing connection, speedtest.net isnt a good tool to use, if you arent getting full whack speed from gamefiles.blueyonder.co.uk, then you need to either post on the Virgin Media newsgroups, if not then nothing you can really do, remmeber other sites will only give you the speed its servers can handle so remmeber if there server is 10Mb and its busy your gonna expericnce slow speeds also try open dns

http://www.opendns.com/ this should help with the slow browsing

[Calliope]

it could be a Virgin Media routing connection,

That was what I was thinking. Not too sure what I can do about it, though, if that's the case.


then you need to either post on the Virgin Media newsgroups, if not then nothing you can really do,

Where do I find those?

remmeber other sites will only give you the speed its servers can handle so remmeber if there server is 10Mb and its busy your gonna expericnce slow speeds

I should probably clarify that sites that used to be fast as of Friday have been appalingly slow, and they all changed at once. I've tried repeatedly throughout the day and night to see if it was congestion and there's no change at all based on the time I try to download.

Here's a set of tracert's to www.bbc.co.uk, for those so interested:

C:\>tracert www.bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.251.195]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 8 ms 5 ms 5 ms 10.26.128.1
3 18 ms 10 ms 7 ms midd-t2cam1-b-ge87.network.virginmedia.net [213.
106.239.253]
4 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms midd-t3core-1b-ae2-0.network.virginmedia.net [19
5.182.176.117]
5 15 ms 18 ms 15 ms man-bb-b-so-310-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.1
05.75.49]
6 15 ms 16 ms 16 ms man-bb-a-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.1
87.177]
7 24 ms 31 ms 22 ms gfd-bb-b-so-200-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.25
2.192.94]
8 24 ms 23 ms 24 ms redb-ic-1-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.
185.78]
9 24 ms 34 ms 25 ms 212.58.239.249
10 26 ms 26 ms 24 ms 212.58.238.133
11 19 ms 18 ms 18 ms 212.58.239.58
12 23 ms 24 ms 23 ms www-vip.telhc.bbc.co.uk [212.58.251.195]

Trace complete.

C:\>tracert www.bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.251.195]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 7 ms 18 ms 7 ms 10.26.128.1
3 7 ms 6 ms 9 ms midd-t2cam1-b-ge87.network.virginmedia.net [213.
106.239.253]
4 10 ms 7 ms 5 ms midd-t3core-1b-ae2-0.network.virginmedia.net [19
5.182.176.117]
5 21 ms 19 ms 15 ms man-bb-b-so-310-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.1
05.75.49]
6 17 ms 25 ms 15 ms man-bb-a-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.1
87.177]
7 22 ms 22 ms 26 ms gfd-bb-b-so-200-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.25
2.192.94]
8 40 ms 24 ms 43 ms redb-ic-1-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.
185.78]
9 215 ms 214 ms 210 ms 212.58.239.249
10 23 ms 23 ms 44 ms 212.58.238.133
11 18 ms 19 ms 17 ms 212.58.239.58
12 23 ms 23 ms 23 ms www-vip.telhc.bbc.co.uk [212.58.251.195]

Trace complete.

C:\>tracert www.bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.251.195]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 6 ms 5 ms 7 ms 10.26.128.1
3 7 ms 6 ms 25 ms midd-t2cam1-b-ge87.network.virginmedia.net [213.
106.239.253]
4 8 ms 5 ms 12 ms midd-t3core-1b-ae2-0.network.virginmedia.net [19
5.182.176.117]
5 15 ms 15 ms 16 ms man-bb-b-so-310-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.1
05.75.49]
6 15 ms 15 ms 15 ms man-bb-a-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.1
87.177]
7 21 ms 21 ms 26 ms gfd-bb-b-so-200-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.25
2.192.94]
8 24 ms 24 ms 25 ms redb-ic-1-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.
185.78]
9 24 ms 26 ms 28 ms 212.58.239.249
10 25 ms 34 ms 25 ms 212.58.238.133
11 44 ms 19 ms 19 ms 212.58.239.58
12 24 ms 24 ms 24 ms www-vip.telhc.bbc.co.uk [212.58.251.195]

Trace complete.

Been getting those rather odd pings since the problems started. Sometimes it drops packets entirely. It doesn't seem to be isolated to any one point on the route, either, despite what hop 9 on the second tracert would imply.

[xspeedyx]

Try opendns

[Calliope]

Try opendns

No noticable change, sadly. :(

[Pingu Pi]

Hey Calliope, im from middlesbrough aswell and have been experiencing the exact same problem, last thursday or friday i noticed that everything seemed to be slow, my browsing and torrents seem hampered. Sites that usually pop up instantly on my 20mb connection take a while now. Speed test results are the same as yours when i used to get 19000 before thursday. sites that usually give max download speed of 2.3mbs a second are now down to 20kbs.

ive tried the blueyonder speed test posted on a few other threads n that gives me my max speed so that shows its not a problem on my end so im thinking it must be a problem on VM's end, perhaps the lines.

this is really annoying as i dont expect to get this when im paying the amount i do.

ive had no troubles up until now with VM.

[Calliope]

Hey Pingu.

That's "good" to know. Have you tried calling VM, yet? I emailed them on Friday but haven't had a response, going to call them later today. Another mate in Middlesbrough with the same VM package as me has no problems at all.

[Pingu Pi]

yeah i rang up, they said my modem was fine n thats all haha. they aren't much help when it comes to problems on thier end.

i think we've just got to sit tight n wait it out...

browsing seems a bit faster this afternoon but still dragging on the speed test and downloads from usual good sources.

[Calliope]

Just got off the phone with VM tech support and was told the same as you, my modem is okay and we discovered that the gamefiles site works fine, so "not our problem".

Wonderful.

[Kymmy]

If your network is fine to the VM servers then that discounts anything such as STM or over subscription.

If some sites enable you to download at full speed where others don;t then more liekly to be a bottleneck somewhere along the route (bottlenecks might not show up on tracerts as a tracert only shows the routing times and not the throughput.

[Boabyboy]

While I cannot confirm to you if there is a problem in the Middlesbrough area. I would start the following troubleshooting steps:

Disconnect router.
Plug CM to PC via RJ45 straight cable.
Reboot CM first then PC after a few mins.
Check IP address to ensure it is a valid IP, such as 62,77,80,82,92,195 ( ithink)
Do a netstat -b to check to ensure there are no open running background programs using the Internet.
Then ping default gateway 50 times to see if you are getting packet loss.

Start off with that and see how its goes? That what I would do if you were asking me, then I would start to use the other tools such as tracert, etc. I am not quite sure about the Ex-NTL Cable Modem freqs, power levels, etc. To me they look ok.

Thanks.

[Calliope]

If your network is fine to the VM servers then that discounts anything such as STM or over subscription.

If some sites enable you to download at full speed where others don;t then more liekly to be a bottleneck somewhere along the route (bottlenecks might not show up on tracerts as a tracert only shows the routing times and not the throughput.

Hi Kymmy,

I'd tend to agree with you about the bottleneck on the route somewhere. And yeah, the tracert was just something VM'd requested, I posted it cause it showed some rather abnormal ping times scattered across the connection.


While I cannot confirm to you if there is a problem in the Middlesbrough area. I would start the following troubleshooting steps:

Disconnect router.
Plug CM to PC via RJ45 straight cable.
Reboot CM first then PC after a few mins.
Check IP address to ensure it is a valid IP, such as 62,77,80,82,92,195 ( ithink)
Do a netstat -b to check to ensure there are no open running background programs using the Internet.
Then ping default gateway 50 times to see if you are getting packet loss.

Hi Boaby,

Just followed your advice, everything seems fine.
50 pings went successfully, no packet loss. Some slight discrepancies in the response times but nothing major (maybe 5ms variance).

EDIT: Oh yeah, I should point out that the ping times to my gateway were fine; 6ms was the average with 17 the maximum.

The VM tech agreed there might be a problem somewhere along the line but said they wouldn't look into it unless a bunch of people in my area complain about it. While I agree that it may genuinely not be VM's fault, I don't really like the idea that I pay what I do to be told they're not interested unless they're risking losing a lot of subscribers.

[AdamD]

I'm getting the same issue, as of a few days ago, although it might've been further back, I just wasn't using the internet much till Monday, which is when I noticed at primetime, I was getting 1mb speeds

http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/12/33639618-uber-slow-speeds-after-4pmish.html

[whydoIneedatech]

Hi Kymmy,

I'd tend to agree with you about the bottleneck on the route somewhere. And yeah, the tracert was just something VM'd requested, I posted it cause it showed some rather abnormal ping times scattered across the connection.




Hi Boaby,

Just followed your advice, everything seems fine.
50 pings went successfully, no packet loss. Some slight discrepancies in the response times but nothing major (maybe 5ms variance).

EDIT: Oh yeah, I should point out that the ping times to my gateway were fine; 6ms was the average with 17 the maximum.

The VM tech agreed there might be a problem somewhere along the line but said they wouldn't look into it unless a bunch of people in my area complain about it. While I agree that it may genuinely not be VM's fault, I don't really like the idea that I pay what I do to be told they're not interested unless they're risking losing a lot of subscribers.
They have to have so many complaints in order to trigger an Outage, till then you have to wait otherwise they would have so many minor faults under investigation that they would run out of resources.

( I am not saying your fault is minor, because as it is affecting you personally its a major fault ;) )

[Calliope]

They have to have so many complaints in order to trigger an Outage, till then you have to wait otherwise they would have so many minor faults under investigation that they would run out of resources.

I understand the reasoning behind it, it's just the way she phrased it I suppose that annoyed me. It came across as less "I'm sorry, but we need more complaints before we can do anything" and more "Shut up and keep paying".

I got a response today to the email I'd sent in about it, so we'll see how that pans out I suppose.

Are the others who were suffering from this problem still experiencing it or is it just me now?

[NeoPickaze]

I'm in the TS4 area and have the exact same problem.

Been going on for the past week, I play a lot of online games and in those it's showing as lag spikes and dropped packets. It seems to be a problem with the gateway we're on possibly.



Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.253.67]

over a maximum of 30 hops:



1 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms DD-WRT [192.168.1.1]

2 16 ms 6 ms 6 ms 10.26.128.1

3 7 ms 8 ms 26 ms midd-t2cam1-b-ge87.network.virginmedia.net [213.106.239.253]

4 6 ms 33 ms 7 ms midd-t3core-1b-ae1-0.network.virginmedia.net [195.182.176.113]

5 16 ms 17 ms 16 ms man-bb-b-so-310-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.75.49]

6 15 ms 34 ms 16 ms man-bb-a-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.187.177]

7 25 ms 22 ms 24 ms gfd-bb-b-so-200-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.252.192.94]

8 23 ms 26 ms 26 ms redb-ic-1-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.185.78]

9 27 ms 23 ms 37 ms 212.58.239.249

10 23 ms 24 ms 24 ms 212.58.238.133

11 19 ms 21 ms 19 ms te12-1.hsw0.cwwtf.bbc.co.uk [212.58.239.222]

12 21 ms 23 ms 20 ms www-vip.cwwtf.bbc.co.uk [212.58.253.67]



Trace complete.





I'm on the bell to Vmedia at the moment I'll let you know how it goes, I'm also on 20mb.

[Calliope]

Any update on this, Neo? What did they tell you?

[Axegrinder]

NeoPickaze, that tracert looks all good ;)

[NeoPickaze]

They told me everything was fine and that it's problems with the internet pages I'm visiting.

It's a very difficult problem to reproduce but I run my own file upload site and for some reason from Virgin I'm getting 20kb/s downloads yet my friends in Europe and south of England are obtaining 1.2 - 2mb/s when we're testing.

Upload seems totally unaffected.

It's not a problem with the pages I'm visiting, it's some intermittent issue with Virgin.

I'll try ring them again on Monday and see if I can get someone interested, first time I called they just said 'Dial 151' so I did like an idiot and it's just that automated problem line ;)

[slowcoach]

The plague is spreading, just under 2Mbps this evening, normally 19Mbps at any time of day or night. Somethings afoot. :erm:

[Pingu Pi]

Hey guys, im still suffering badly still.

webpages still sloppy loading, downloads of webpages still bad ranges between 20 and 50kbs

online gaming, cod4 i now find myself lagging in fights as grenade launcher 50% of the time isn't registering impact, this is even worse with knives as they resfuse to register.

this hasn't happened till this whole ordeal started the other week.

im really getting annoyed, my torrents ant being affected really but everything else is, slow loading into gaming servers, crapp webpages, cant download from webpages. im not happy, you'd think they'd fix it by now.

[philyb]

i too am suffering pretty badly

ever since i downgraded to 10mb, the speeds have been **** poor.

[Calliope]

Yes, I'm still suffering from this too. Think I'm going to call VM today to see about cancelling my account.

[slowcoach]

Sorry guys, after rebooting everything my speed was back to 19Mb and has remained so ever since, so I don't have a similar problem to yours.

[NeoPickaze]

What's interesting is whenever I check my modem logs it's trying to update some software after a reboot and failing. Maybe this could be the cause.

Downstream Lock : Locked
Downstream Channel Id : 41
Downstream Frequency : 402750000 Hz
Downstream Modulation : QAM256
Downstream Symbol Rate : 5360.537 Ksym/sec
Downstream Interleave Depth : taps32Increment4
Downstream Receive Power Level : 5.2 dBmV
Downstream SNR : 40.0 dB

Upstream Lock : Locked
Upstream Channel ID : 1
Upstream Frequency : 25800000 Hz
Upstream Modulation : QPSK
Upstream Symbol Rate : 2560 Ksym/sec
Upstream transmit Power Level : 54.5 dBmV
Upstream Mini-Slot Size : 2

Last Time Priority Description
Sat Oct 11 22:21:56 2008 Sat Oct 11 22:21:56 2008 Information (7) CableModem software upgrade failed
Sat Oct 11 22:21:56 2008 Sat Oct 11 22:21:56 2008 Error (4) SW upgrade Failed after download - Incompatible SW file
Sat Oct 11 22:21:56 2008 Sat Oct 11 22:21:56 2008 Information (7) SW dload: Invalid image signature!
Sat Oct 11 22:21:55 2008 Sat Oct 11 22:21:55 2008 Notice (6) SW Download INIT - Via Config file cmreg-ntlhm250-bund03.cm
Sat Oct 11 22:21:55 2008 Sat Oct 11 22:21:55 2008 Information (7) CableModem software download started
Sat Oct 11 22:21:55 2008 Sat Oct 11 22:21:55 2008 Information (7) Software upgrade has started.

[Axegrinder]

Your modem levels are ok, the upstream is borderline though.

[xxxxxx]

What's interesting is whenever I check my modem logs it's trying to update some software after a reboot and failing. Maybe this could be the cause.

Downstream Lock : Locked
Downstream Channel Id : 41
Downstream Frequency : 402750000 Hz
Downstream Modulation : QAM256
Downstream Symbol Rate : 5360.537 Ksym/sec
Downstream Interleave Depth : taps32Increment4
Downstream Receive Power Level : 5.2 dBmV
Downstream SNR : 40.0 dB

Upstream Lock : Locked
Upstream Channel ID : 1
Upstream Frequency : 25800000 Hz
Upstream Modulation : QPSK
Upstream Symbol Rate : 2560 Ksym/sec
Upstream transmit Power Level : 54.5 dBmV
Upstream Mini-Slot Size : 2

Last Time Priority Description
Sat Oct 11 22:21:56 2008 Sat Oct 11 22:21:56 2008 Information (7) CableModem software upgrade failed
Sat Oct 11 22:21:56 2008 Sat Oct 11 22:21:56 2008 Error (4) SW upgrade Failed after download - Incompatible SW file
Sat Oct 11 22:21:56 2008 Sat Oct 11 22:21:56 2008 Information (7) SW dload: Invalid image signature!
Sat Oct 11 22:21:55 2008 Sat Oct 11 22:21:55 2008 Notice (6) SW Download INIT - Via Config file cmreg-ntlhm250-bund03.cm
Sat Oct 11 22:21:55 2008 Sat Oct 11 22:21:55 2008 Information (7) CableModem software download started
Sat Oct 11 22:21:55 2008 Sat Oct 11 22:21:55 2008 Information (7) Software upgrade has started.

I get the same problem.

[Stabhappy]

Isn't that downstream freq wrong? I'm not a VM tech and can only hint at this because I'm not sure what is considered acceptable. I've always thought 310000000 or 390000000 was the only two accepted freqs. Anyone care to enlighten me?

[whydoIneedatech]

Isn't that downstream freq wrong? I'm not a VM tech and can only hint at this because I'm not sure what is considered acceptable. I've always thought 310000000 or 390000000 was the only two accepted freqs. Anyone care to enlighten me?

Correct if on a EX-Telewest connection, but not in this case as they are EX-NTL and use different frequencies.

[Calliope]

So this problem went away completely for me a few days ago without my doing anything, and now it's suddenly returned full force.

Any of the others posting here still suffering, or is it just me now? I've checked with a bunch of other folks in my area, all Virgin, and they're having similar problems to me.

[Pingu Pi]

still got the problem mate. doesn't seem to have let up really :\

[Pingu Pi]

Woken up this afternoon, 1pm to find the speedtests are upto 9mb now and websites loading allot faster along with download speeds off the good websites of 800kbs, a lot better than it was at a crumby 20kbs before. im just glad to have atleast websites loading freely again, that was the main pain in the a***

anything on ur end guys? be nice to know if its an area thing or if im just getting a temporary reprieve :s

[Calliope]

Everything seems to be back to normal for me, too, as of this morning. It's faster than it used to be, even.

Must have been some local thing going on, I suppose.

[Pingu Pi]

mines gone again... it was upto full speed this afternoon but now ive just noticed its been getting laggy again n sure enough, its collapsed to shoddy speeds :(

i shouldn't have said anything, i probs jinxed it haha

[r00t]

PM me your modem MAC, you may want to check with the CF_staff (http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/showgroups.php) to make sure I'm legit :)