Speed test results suggest Virgin Media slow on 19th January 2021
If you have a Virgin Media broadband service and today it is feeling slower than usual it looks like you are not alone.
We monitor our speed test results at hourly intervals for all the major broadband providers and the median download speed has been triggering our alerts at 1:15pm, 2:15pm, 3:15pm and 4:15pm for Virgin Media. The median does seem to getting slightly better as the day progresses so things may be improving, the real test will be the evening peak time hours.
Median and mean download/upload speeds for Virgin Media from 22nd September 2020 to 19th January 2021.
The alerts are triggered by the median download speed, the speeds need to be outside a range defined as two standard deviations i.e. outside of 80.71 to 108.49 Mbps when looking at data from the last 30 days.
The long term trend does show other days when the speeds have dipped close to the alert levels, so it may be that there has been a big software patch for a popular game that has added to the network load of all the home schooling and zoom classes causing this drop. Alternatively we may just be seeing an unusual influx of people on the slower Virgin Media products, but the test volumes don't suggest that is the case.
Comments
There was likely some routing changes overnight, but all looked normal by 4am. As overnight is very quiet for speed tests the blips at that time would not have been enough to create the impact seen. Unless of course there is now less capacity in their core or exit points.
- andrew
- about 1 month ago
My VM connection (S London) has been exceptionally poor during peak hours over the last week. It usually hovers around 45% of the 350Mbit package, but this week it has regularly dropped below 25%.
In the early hours of this morning there was a routing change, lasting from approx. 0020 to 0420 which added ~5ms to the TBB BQM.
Interestingly, today is not the worst for me according to the Whitebox.
I should add that between 0200 and 1100 my connection is good for ~380Mbit, and there are no glaring signal quality issues.
What’s the Whitebox?
Daytime average now running at 85.4 Mbps, peak time 91.6 Mbps
- andrew
- about 1 month ago
All good in N.Ireland
In St Albans / North London VM seem to have serious issues. My upload speed has been hovering between 200-500 kB/s with lots of dropped packets over the past week during day time. Makes it impossible to work from home.
Not sure what VM did though. I only had very sporadic issues before Christmas.
Unable to route to certain ips, unsure why
seems to be OK-ish here..?? (SW london)
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/1611140241219675955
second time went oddly??
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/1611141403519765455
another good test! gives a lot of info..
http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/67052083
Re "What's the Whitebox"
please read the following
https://samknows.one/hc/en-gb/
Area 20 (RH2 postcode)... On M100 packge.
Only getting 7mbps down, 0.2mbps up from 09:00 to 19:00 weekdays since the New Year... :(
VM Support/Help utterly useless - long waits on phone to 150 only for VM to drop the call 2/3 time!
Some kind of over-utilization/Brexit effect?
Upload speeds in London dropped from 35Mbps to 10Mbps during the day because of the renewed lockdown. Have had another outage today. Frustrating.
It is pretty grim here in Hampshire, kind of rubs in the letter from Virgin Media say that the costs are increasing.
One would have thought that when one is increasing the cost one would ensure the service was squeaky clean.
Not experienced any issue here (in Fife). SamKnows results showing a consistent 520 -540 Mbps.
Should have noted that I'm on the M500 package.
Addendum to my earlier comment...
Those speeds are over CAT5e Cable BTW!
From my logs on my connections from Virgin Media & Virgin Media Business, since the 4th January I've been seeing elevated ping times from 10am to 7pm, with today (22.01.21) and the 18th being particularly bad - VM connection is Gig1 and VMB is 200Mb speed seems fine though
this is as recorded by my pfsense router
There's clearly something very wrong with VM broadband service but they're not letting on about it all... There Status page reports all Hunky Dory!
I'm on the 350mbps package. My bandwidth remains fairly decent, but my latency is horrendous - pings have maxed out at 1000ms. I've raised an official complaint based upon false advertising with regards to their service being perfect for gaming.
Daily dropouts with high packet loss on 100Mbps. Factory resetting the hub most days, 13% price rise letter really rubs salt in the wound - phone "help" not very helpful so will call a third time... at least the monitor graphs from here are helping demonstrate there's a fault
I always say that phone help is *always* going to be very busy... If you can email , online forum, or even text chat, it is better.. Years ago when talktalk was very bad, I got a solution in a few days - much better than waiting on the phone!
My VM internet went down for ~10 minutes at about 1am, virginmedia.com was also down completely.