New 50Mb Customer with conerns

[marko2002]

Hi guys, I've just had the 50Mb service installed after being on ADSL with BePro for a few years - I had been with VM before them on the 20Mb package but I left after their speeds and reliability went to the dogs though on hearing so many people speak highly of the 50Mb service I decided to give it a try.

Here's my concerns - initially everything went great, a few speedtests and I was maxing out at 45Mb, but then I would notice browsing or downloading become sluggish - another speedtest would reveal a much lesser download speed. Then I realised that it was only after doing a few speedtests, things would pick up again. So, I started each morning doing my usual activities online and when I noticed the speed issue I did a speedtest. Once finished, I would continue with my browsing and work which seemed much more responsive. Another speedtest would indicate my speed was now fine. I couldn't help but think to myself that it's almost as if VM somehow know I was speedtesting them, poor to begin with then after the speedtest great!.

I'm guessing this is most probably impractical to suggest, but I can't explain it.

Moreso, just today I was trying to download a 17mb from download.com and it was painful - after the speedtest it came down at 2Mb. Now, I'm not entirely clued up on the whole Mb/Kbps thing, but isn't 2Mb from download.com still terrible on a 50Mb line?.

If anyone can offer any form of diagnostics for me to run before I make a fool of myself with VM, I'd be most grateful.

Thanks in advance
Marko

[Sephiroth]

It's a very difficult problem and is what the majority of threads are about. The first port of call for us on the forum is to make sure of some basics. These are:

1. Find out whether or not your modem is operating under correct tolerances
2. Look to see where on the route problems might lie.

1/
Log onto the modem at 192.168.100.1 with UN/PW = root/root
Publish the upstream and downstream information on this forum. We'll be looking to see that the MER and power levels are satisfactory. Plus anything else we can glean from the stats.

2/
In the CMD window run a ping test so we can see if there's anything in the path that looks dodgy.

tracert www.bbc.co.uk > fred.txt

Then open fred.txt in Notepad to copy and paste the report into your post.

That's our starting point for advising whether or not you should call VM.

The other thing is we'd like to know what time of day gives you what experience. It's also worth your knowing that a speed test made just after an experience tells you nothing about what has just happened. It can vary from one second to the next. A series of speed tests performed as fast as you can do them over an extended period will give a far better picture of what's happening in your area. If you can be arsed.

Another way of doing it is to simulataneously download two large (preferabley identical) files (say 250 MB) from two obviously different locations and see what the download rate is from each location.

I hope the above gives you something to work with.

[marko2002]

Hi Sephiroth, thanks for the quick response ..
Time of day can really be anytime (sorry, I know this isn't really that useful) but I work from home and am usually on the net most times of the day. I've known that speedtests online can often be unreliable also but used them as a benchmark when comparing other tests but again this could be false comparison I guess.

As for downloading, I did so from filehippo and cnet, a file of around 39Mb just for a quick test and from filehippo it was downloading at 1.3MB/sec and from cnet at 350kb/sec.

Here's the other info you asked for ...

Acquired Downstream Channel 299.001343 MHz Primary Downstream Locked
Ranged Upstream Channel 25.799999 MHz Success
Provisioning State OK Operational
Ethernet Link Status Up 100 Mbps/Full duplex



Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.251.195]

over a maximum of 30 hops:



1 5 ms 5 ms 5 ms 10.141.224.1

2 5 ms 5 ms 5 ms osr01uddi-ge39.network.virginmedia.net [80.3.17.1]

3 6 ms 5 ms 5 ms uddi-core-1a-ge-010-0.network.virginmedia.net [80.3.16.69]

4 43 ms 9 ms 9 ms lee-bb-a-so-302-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.175.189]

5 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms nth-bb-b-as2-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.185.101]

6 16 ms 16 ms 15 ms tele-ic-1-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.184.2]

7 16 ms 15 ms 16 ms pos6-1.rt0.thdo.bbc.co.uk [212.58.239.237]

8 17 ms 17 ms 17 ms 212.58.238.153

9 17 ms 15 ms 16 ms 212.58.239.62

10 17 ms 15 ms 15 ms www-vip.telhc.bbc.co.uk [212.58.251.195]

Trace complete.

Here's a snippet from the eventlog also which I found a bit worrying given I have some "Critical" warnings!

e Nov 24 00:06:36 2009 Tue Nov 24 00:06:36 2009 Critical (3) Ranging Request Retries exausted;CM-MAC=***;CMTS-MAC=***;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
Tue Nov 24 00:06:36 2009 Tue Nov 24 00:06:36 2009 Critical (3) Unicast Maintenance Ranging attempted - No response - Retries exhausted;CM-MAC=***c;CMTS-MAC=***;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
Tue Nov 24 00:06:42 2009 Tue Nov 24 00:06:46 2009 Critical (3) No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out;CM-MAC=***;CMTS-MAC=***;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
Tue Nov 24 00:06:46 2009 Tue Nov 24 00:06:46 2009 Warning (5) B-INIT-RNG Failure - Retries exceeded;CM-MAC=***;CMTS-MAC=***;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;

Hope you can make something of this :)
Thanks
Marko

[Sephiroth]

The tracert shows that at the time you did it, nothing in the VM network was holding you up.

The modem stats are not sufficient. There should be Upstream and Downstream data showing voltage levels, channels acquired and so on. That's what we need to see to judge against your download test.

The event log is a red herring. If there had been anything from around this time of day, it might have been more interesting.

If the pings from tracert are Ok then youmight have a lcal problem at the street cab or your modem. We need to see the stats.

[marko2002]

Sorry, is this the required info ...

Cable Modem Upstream
US-1 US-2 US-3 US-4
Channel Type 1.0 N/A N/A N/A
Channel ID 1 N/A N/A N/A
Frequency
(Hz) 25800000 N/A N/A N/A
Ranging Status Success N/A N/A N/A
Modulation 16QAM N/A N/A N/A
Symbol Rate
(KSym/sec) 2560 N/A N/A N/A
Mini-Slot Size 2 N/A N/A N/A
Power Level
(dBmV) 42.25 N/A N/A N/A
T1 Timeouts 0
T2 Timeouts 0 0 0 0
T3 Timeouts 332 0 0 0
T4 Timeouts 1 0 0 0

Cable Modem Downstream
DS-1 DS-2 DS-3 DS-4
Frequency 299000000 307000000 315000000 N/A
Lock Status
(QAM Lock/FEC Sync/MPEG Lock) Y/Y/Y Y/Y/Y Y/Y/Y N/N/N
Channel Id 24 25 26 N/A
Modulation 256QAM 256QAM 256QAM N/A
Symbol Rate
(Msym/sec) 6.952 6.952 6.952 N/A
Interleave Depth I=12
J=17 I=12
J=17 I=12
J=17 N/A
Power Level
(dBmV) 5.63 4.64 4.42 N/A
RxMER
(dB) 37.36 37.36 38.26 N/A
Correctable
Codewords 10 16 3 N/A
Uncorrectable
Codewords 305 288 300 N/A

[Sephiroth]

The power levels appear fine to me. The RxMER is respectable.

We'll need to keep an eye on the growth of Uncorrectable Codewords. I'm less concerned about the T3 timeouts, but if you have a string of them in the event log (not three or four) then VM needs to investigate the problem.

With regard to download.com, I suspect that this site is somewhat throttled by its admins. I've always had slow downloads from there. Try support.Microsoft.com which I find is several times faster.

You've got a bit of playing around to do. Daytime (which I presume is when you were trying things out) should be fairly quiet at least until 15:00.

Till we hear from you again.

[Ignitionnet]

I am very concerned by the T3 timeouts and would suggest a post to the newsgroups. If you could also post the last time you saw the modem come online on the logs that would also be great.

Message would be things like:

SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Loss of Sync
or
Received Response to Broadcast Maintenance Request, But no Unicast Maintenance opportunities received - T4 time out

Most recent instance of either of these please.

[Sephiroth]

I am very concerned by the T3 timeouts and would suggest a post to the newsgroups. If you could also post the last time you saw the modem come online on the logs that would also be great.

Message would be things like:

SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Loss of Sync
or
Received Response to Broadcast Maintenance Request, But no Unicast Maintenance opportunities received - T4 time out

Most recent instance of either of these please.

No quarrel with you, BB, but I took those T3 timeouts to correlate with the event log period that the OP posted.

[marko2002]

Message would be things like:

SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Loss of Sync
or
Received Response to Broadcast Maintenance Request, But no Unicast Maintenance opportunities received - T4 time out

I' m not seeing anything such as that in the logs, would you consider it worth still posting this to the newsgroups, if so which ones (sorry, not used to this!).

Sephiroth, will keep an eye on things over the weekend and try downloading various files and see what kind of speeds I get.
Thanks for all the assistance so far guys
Marko

[Ignitionnet]

No quarrel with you, BB, but I took those T3 timeouts to correlate with the event log period that the OP posted.

There's only 1 in that log Seph, note the 1st and last occurrence times.

[marko2002]

Not sure if I'm doing the right thing here guys, but here's the complete log ...

[MOD: Content removed, please repost without all the MAC numbers unless you wish your modem cloned :rolleyes: ]

[Ignitionnet]

Ah ok - modem was having some trouble getting online.

Anything else?

[marko2002]

Not sure what else you would need, I'm really not so good with broadband technology, if there is anything else you can figure would be useful I'd gladly provide it :)
Thanks
Marko

[Kymmy]

Can I remind people NOT to post MAC's or Serial numbers within Modem logs

[marko2002]

Sorry Kymmy, didn't realise will remember for future

[marko2002]

Hi guys, sorry it took me so long to get back to you .. I've been downloading various files from various sources including support.Microsoft.com and here's what I've found. I downloaded usually during the day and then later in the evening (after 10pm) and didn't really find a great deal of difference in the speed - typical file size was 50mb:

support.Microsoft.com - max 3.5MB/sec
download.com - max 2.5MB/sec
filehippo - max 2.3MB/sec

Thing is, of all the downloads I have not downloaded any faster than 3.5Mb/sec and couldn't say whether this is the faster I could hope to download on a 50mb line - any further tests I could do to verify things?
Cheers
Marko

---------- Post added at 23:08 ---------- Previous post was at 23:03 ----------

Oh, also forgot, sourceforge downloads usually come down at around the 200KB/sec!

[graf_von_anonym]

I can see that you are connecting through the Uddingston OSR, and there have been a few folk reporting slow speeds on this forum in that area. Admittedly, there's a large number of things that can cause slow speeds, so it might just be coincidence. I think it's probably worth popping onto the VM support newsgroups and asking them to have a look for you - there may well be an issue with the unit you connect through. I'm aware of a few issues with the 50Mb service relating to TX load rather than strict bandwidth shortfall, and it could be that you're caught up in one of those. VM are best placed to check.

[marko2002]

Thanks mate, will have a go and hopefully get something sorted :)
Marko