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@virginmediaperformanceuk
Progress !!!
Apparently, if it is a known issue you can speak directly to billing (03445 454 1111 option 3 then 4) which will save the 45 minutes talking tech support. They have applied a discount which will last until this issue is meant to be resolved on August 02. The discount is around £10.5 a month or 27%. If it’s not resolved in August, I need to ring back to have the discount reapplied.
Compensation
After 40 minutes of holding and being passed around from tech support to customer support to tech support to customer services then back to tech support again, they finally admitted the areas backbone has reached capacity. They offered a discount until August when this is scheduled to be fixed but having heard that story back in February I was skeptical. I will write a post when the discount comes through so you all know what you can ask for and I’ll write a post in August when we know if the problem is fixed. Until then please share this blog around. Sadly, the only way Virgin Media will fix this is when it becomes too expensive to ignore.
The Results
Green line is 200Mbs (what I pay for) Blue line is weekdays measured as hourly average (6 tests per hour) and orange line is the same but weekends. 3-9am in the morning we are getting 190/200Mbs on average. That’s 95%, hardly worth complaining about. 9-10pm we are averaging 20/200Mbs. That’s 10% and in my view pretty poor. On weekends between 1-5pm we are getting around 100/200Mbs.
Conclusion: Because we are seeing 95%+ during early hours of the morning I’m saying the test, all hardware, cables, server, router, hub are all working correctly. AWS is a business tool and as such their load pattern is 9-5 business hours. This does not show in the graph there for I am ruling out interference from AWS. The graph clearly shows “normal domestic user usage”. We can see it later on week nights and weekend afternoons. So in conclusion the data is accurate and gives us a clear picture.
The ANSWER!!!
So after a while I came up with a solution. I uploaded a 100mb text file to Amazons AWS S3 cloud. For those of you who don’t know what the S3 is, it’s a brilliant product. Think distributed, managed file storage. As far as I am aware there is no one beating AWS for hosting, speed and costs. AWS has a nasty learning curve but if you’re a bit of a geek and haven’t played with it definitely worth a look.
The 100mb text file is publicly available distributed across 20+ data centres. There is no way the bottle neck is AWS. We can test this by transferring the file between data centres. It happens so fast I couldn’t actually get a measurement on how quickly S3 data is served. The reports say 900Mbs I was getting significantly more than that.
Next I wrote a script that downloaded the file every 10 minutes, recorded how long it took, converted it to Mbs then stored it in a SQL database. For those who are quick at maths that meant I was downloading an extra 420gb per month in speed tests. Given how much time I have wasted complaining to Virgin Media I don’t feel guilty at all. :-D
Cant trust your data
You can’t use wireless to test speed. This is a common mistake. Wireless is about connectivity not speed and was never designed for high throughput. Next issue is “the snapshot in time”. For the data geeks the simple question is what do you call statistically significant? Long story short any “one off” snapshot will not give you the full picture. Different times of day will give you different speeds. Your usage in your house will effect it (maybe someone is watching Netflix in the other room). Etc etc. The only way to accurately measure speed is by averaging many samples.
First things first. Wireless sucks. People never get the performance they expect and the wireless that is supplied with the virgin media equipment isn’t capable (even if you put your laptop right next to the hub) of reaching 200Mbs that you paid for. If you want to check this open “Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Network and Sharing Centre” right click on “Connections Wi-Fi (wifi name)”. I’m using industrial proper office grade wireless gear and am getting 975Mbs. In reality halve it! You will never achieve the full speed. But even halved this should be more than enough to hit my 200Mbs limit.
http://beta.speedtest.net/ 12-06-2017
Test your Internet connection bandwidth to locations around the world with this interactive broadband speed test from Ookla
We first noticed speed issues when watching Netflix. Every now and then the video quality would drop right down. Me being the geek that I am I ran a speed test. For those who aren’t aware http://beta.speedtest.net/ is brilliant free tool for measuring your internet speed. Here is my result at 15:46 on the 12-06-2017 72Mbs down and 12Mbs up.
The saga thus far…
We moved to Kingsgate Rd NW6 (on the boarder of Kilburn and West Hampstead). I asked around and people recommended Virgin Media for internet. We signed up to the 12 month 200MBs package. Performance was well… shocking. Lots of trouble shooting, lots of tweaking and settled with….
Virgin Media 3 box in modem mode connecting to Ubiquity Edge 3 Max router (love this router will write a post on it later) connected to two Ubiquity UniFI AC/AP Pro wireless mesh access points.