[Wylug-discuss] Virgin broadband (North East Leeds)

[Martin Rowe]

On 28 March 2012 13:41, Andrew J Cole <ajcole at ajcole.org> wrote:
> Long e-mail from a retired colleague living in NE Leeds (LS 15).
>
> The gist is that they (without mentioning it to me) have noticed a gradual
> decline in their (Virgin) performance over the last 4 or 5 months with
> more and more "not responding" messages and problems connecting to
> spool mail (they probably wouldn't notice connection problems/delays
> with outgoing SMTP).
>
> The N-R messages could well all be mail connection failures since they
> occur "out of the blue" and appear to be accompanied by "the screen
> text fading" - the latetr probably some artifact of the MS Mail popup.
> No specific mention of browsing problems.  Instantly smells like a Virgin
> capacity problem to me.
>
> I set up a number of these some years ago (96/97) - Virgin broadband
> (X or XL then) with a Buffalo WHR-G54S WiFi router.
>
> They called Virgin who asked them to connect their laptop directly
> to the cable modem and "the diagnosis was that they were clear the
> problem was with the hub and speed" and the proposed solution "As a
> consequence of all their current speed upgrading for everyone to the
> faster broadband ... for free, tomorrow, they are (as I understand it)
> upgrading my installation to 30 Mb speed + their own Virgin Super Hub".
>
> Of course there will be nothng at all wrong with the Buffalo and if it
> is "speed" then I am surprised that the cable modem can get confused on
> its LAN side - the implication being that it (sometimes?) wants to run
> at 100 Mb rather then 10 Mb.
>
> On interrogation it turns out that another retired colleague (LS 17)
> has been having similar but milder problems which have become much worse
> over the last couple of weeks.  Neither of them has received any e-mail
> or a flyer from Virgin about upgrades btw.
>
> It seesm that Virgin are on maneuvers.  Has anyone else hit this one?

(resend - meant to go to the list)

There is both upgrading and reallocation going on in the various Leeds
areas. I'm in LS22 and up until the autumn had had full speed, both
down & up on the XXL (50mbit) service. Other people in LS6 weren't
doing as well, so Virgin started migrating some of them to the
Seacroft UBR (that Wetherby uses and that *wasn't* over capacity). No
notification was given, and nothing mentioned on the service status
page. That hit my upload speed (was consistently 5mbit, now max 1.5),
and judging from the visiting engineers, other people in the area.
When calling up after noticing the drop off in speed they were
insistent it was equipment, either mine or the cable modem, at fault.
Engineer visited and couldn't find anything wrong. He swapped my
working cable modem for one of the new superhubs - which performed no
better. They were going to check further. A fortnight later I rang
again as nothing had changed, and in their attempt to get diagnostics
from the superhub they disconnected the link completely! Two days
later and another engineer visit, with another superhub, I was
connected again, but still with the faulty upload issue. At that point
the engineer made quite a number of calls, and gave me the info about
the UBR above.

That reallocation work was all supposed to be resolved by mid-Jan at
the latest. It hasn't been, so I rang again at the weekend to find out
if the UBR work had been completed. Didn't get anywhere with that but
they did send out yet another engineer. He duly checked the equipment
and said it was all spot on, and looked to be still down to the UBR.
I'm waiting on a call from them to arrange further tests, but I won't
hold my breath...

There are speed doubling upgrades being done at present - details at
http://doublespeed.virginmedia.com/ (flash + sound warning) - though
our area will be among the later ones (not due to start until July).

When their system works it's very good, but when it doesn't it really
does seem to be pot luck as to whether you can get hold of someone who
can actually sort it out.

Regards, Martin
-- 
martin at dbg400.net  http://www.dbg400.net
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