Virgin Media Speed Issues

[.Simon]

I've just had 50mb broadband installed today but I can't seem to get speeds over 25 meg?

Could it be the time of the day? I'm not sure if Virgin have "peak" times on their network resulting in slower speeds?

Earlier on when a mate was round for the install, he got just over 50 meg so unsure what's going on!

It's the same for a Mac and 2 laptops, one running XP, the other Vista ...

 

[Nickharding]

25meg and you want faster?

 

[.Simon]

Yes if I'm paying for 50 meg!

 

[Nickharding]

You think your going to notice a difference when web browsing between 50 and 25? .. well you wont, Not unless your doing torrents all day.

 

[.Simon]

No of course I don't think that, but it would be nice to actually reach those speeds when downloading.

If not - I'd rather pay for the 20 meg broadband if that's all I'm going to get all day?

 

[Nickharding]

Lol, i see your point.

Its only the 1st day, give it 2 - 3 days then see how it is, normally picks up

 

[.Simon]

I hope so!

 

[domjolly]

would love 50mb on xbox live no lag would be great at times lol

how much did it cost you?

 

[Adam]

First thing the 50Mb connection is not inline with VM's traffic management scheme so you should see 50Mb all day every day and it is unlimited.

Unless you are a good distance from your cab (green box) in the street then you should be seeing 50Mb. What did the engineer say when he installed it, did he test it?

The other thing is how are you actually measuring your speed. If you are using speedtest.net then the results aren't always going to be accurate. You will see below that on my hardwired connection to my PC it actually spikes and produces and outrageous speed. Do you use Newsgroups at all, if so this will give you a true indication of your speed. I download at a min of 6MBps which is 50Mbps which you should also be getting.

I am on the 50Mb Broadband with VM and I get the full speed, my results are below on various machines/devices.

Hardwired (PC)

Wireless N (MacBook Pro)

Wireless G (iPhone 3GS)

I would suggest speaking with VM if your speeds don't seem increase after a few days.

 

[Adam]

would love 50mb on xbox live no lag would be great at times lol

how much did it cost you?

Unfortunately its not just speed that determine lag, its ping aswell and if your talking about playing MW2 then having both a good speed and ping does sweet fa most times as it is a p2p setup so you are relying on other peoples connections.

 

[.Simon]

That's mine above. Was taken on my Mac on Wireless - router is right next to it. Will try it wired now ...

I wasn't here for the installation however my friend was - the engineer tried it on my mates laptop and got just over 50 meg.

 

[.Simon]

Just tried on the laptop and got 64.06 Mb/s - so I'm wondering if it's a setup issue with the Mac?

 

[Adam]

Was that hardwired? What Mac have you got? As above with my result my Macbook Pro via Wireless N (fastest wireless transfer rate) only gets 40Mbps max but when I download via newsgroup I get full speed.

 

[.Simon]

This is hardwired. Roughly the same!

 

[Adam]

I dont get that, when you got 60Mbps on your laptop was that also hardwired?

 

[.Simon]

Nope - that was wireless, so I guess it's a setting on the Mac ... just googling now.

 

[Adam]

Yeah must be something in the Mac, I cant understand why you would only get that kind of speed via a hardwired connection.

 

[.Simon]

Very interesting - I think it's a Firefox issue!

Just tried on Safari and I'm getting 50mb!

 

[.Simon]

I've just removed all of my Firefox add-ons and reinstalled Firefox, seems to be working properly now!

Thanks Adam.

 

[Adam]

Glad you have sorted it

Enjoy your awesome broadband lol

 

[.Simon]

Much better! :approve:

 

[Ste666]

I usually get bang on 50 meg too with mine........still makes me laugh to see itunes songs download in 2 seconds

 

[KDF]

You get bang on 50mbit because you are actually on 53mbit down and 1.75mbit up. Take TCP overheads into account and that gives you around 50mbit of actual throughput

BTW my 50mbit was slow yesterday but seems to be okay today... maybe there was an issue ?

 

[Ste666]

Sometimes mine seems a little slower than usual even if it still says 50 meg.........i can hardly complain though, bt only gave me 4 meg!

 

[.Simon]

I downloaded an album as a test from iTunes - I think it downloaded in around a minute, I think I may get carried away now though!!

 

[Ste666]

I have done a few films on itunes, a 2gig film takes approx 18 mins lol..........that used to be 2 hours on bt!

 

[.Ben.]

That's awesome! We have the 20Mb 'L' Package and it frequently dips below 15Mbps.

This is wireless using a 100Mbps connection (to the router):

 

[Munson]

I have the option of 50-large, but TBH I can't be arsed with the upgrade. My 20-large pipe is a bit dodge though TBH. I fire up a usenet download and it's up at ~19Mbps for like 3 seconds and then dips to a stable ~15Mbps. Traffic shaping much? I normally just cap it at 12Mbps if I'm using the internet, and it's plenty quick enough.

That said, if you're downloading *.* (The Internet), then the traffic shaping does become a pain after you go over the 'cap'. I may just have to get the fiddy-large sorted out TBH.

 

[Adam]

Has to be done. end!

 

[.Simon]

Just downloaded a Movie from iTunes in 4 minutes - f**k me this thing is fast!

 

[Hawkeye]

I have the 20mb connection from virgin, this is 2 flights up and through 4 walls from the router.

 

[SC03OTT]

I tested three servers (Aberdeen, Manchester & London) and got 5 meg, 7 meg and 10 meg as my results. I'm on 10 meg with VM.

 

[micp]

I need to upgrade to 50mb, this thread makes my 20mb look slow

 

[Leeshez]

Im on virgin also. I have done a speed test on the lappy. It struggled to get 3MB then it shot to this. I think something went wrong.

Im only paying 10MB

 

[Renshaw]

 

[Leeshez]

I have just done the desktop speed. This cant be right.

 

[DMS]

50 meg broadband is f0r teh winz0rz.

What annoys me though, is that 5 minutes down the road in Nottingham, VM are already trialling 100 megabit connections.

Also, in response to those above who mentioned that their connection starts out slow and then gets quicker, there's a reason for that. It's called TCP Windowing.
TCP is a reliable transport protocol. It has a built in mechanism for determining which packets reach the intended host and which don't. It does it by means of SYN > SYN ACK > ACK. Basically, a host receives a TCP packet and it contains a sequence number. The host sends a "SYN ACK" back with the sequence number plus one. TCP windowing basically allows the receiving host to receive loads of packets and only send one acknowledgement back every so often. The acknowledgement is the sum total of the sequence number of all the received packets plus one. This period is the window. The connection is slower temporarily because the amount of acknowledgements being sent back and forth is a huge overhead. Once the window size increases, the connection speeds up due to less overhead.
If the SYN ACK that gets sent back doesn't add up to what the SYN's added up to, the sending host can deduct the SYN ACK from the sequence number it was expecting and will therefore know which packet(s) to re-transmit. Simples.

^ That's about as simple as I can explain it.

 

[KDF]

Nice copy/paste

It's TCP 101, best effort delivery.

And just to be picky the connection doesn't "speed up" it just increases throughput due to lower overheads

 

[DMS]

LOL. If it was a copy and paste job it'd probably be explained much better than that.
I know how it works, as I'm sure you do. Explaining it is much harder than "getting it".

 

[KDF]

A better way to put it would be..

At first it needs to ask the other end constantly if it got each "parcel" ok. Once it knows the delivery is quite reliable it only asks now and again leaving more time to actually send the "parcels"