Virgin Media high-latency issues...

[dataDave]

Anyone else here on Virgin Media?

I'm suffering unusually high latencies of up to 500ms+ on WoW lately, averaging out at around a constant 250+. It's becoming unplayable.

Not much I can do apart from move out as VM are the only providers under my postcode. There's no chance I'm paying a £5 phonecall to speak to someone I can't understand who I know won't be able to fix my problem anyway.

£37 a month for internet gaming speeds reminiscent of 1999. Cheers.

[reektan]

Is this cable or ADSL dude ? Mate of mine is on Cable and hasn't had these latency problems. I do see the odd issue now and then on cable every few months which normally means theres a fault somewhere and they're routing everyone through a certain ubr temporarily causing really shat latency for everyone.

I think theres a thread on latency issues on the wow forums which give you the EU master server IP's to trace/ping etc which might help pinpoint the prob.

[dataDave]

Cable mate. Really getting wound up about it now as I've just spent the first £500/£1100 of what's going to be an ub3r-1337 PC for FPSs and any future MMOs. 120fps isn't worth jack-q-**** if I'm running up to three seconds behind every other c**t.

[reektan]

Is it only in the evenings ? Sound's similar to that odd problem I had after about 6pm .. Just couldn't play anything really.

[dataDave]

I'm in work during 'off-peak' hours so can't really check.

I've just been looking at BT/o2 postcode checker and it seems like I have a choice now.... If I can't get anything sorted (not prepared to pay huge costs on phoning their 'tech support' (lol)) I'll simply jump ship. Luckily the competitors offer 3month trials before you commit to the 12month contract so that's not bad.

[Rossco]

Dunno about latency but my Virgin Media service has been utter balls lately! No where near as fast as it should be. Don't have a clue the problem, and like yourself, I dont want to phone them up wasting a fiver and having them no even understand what your saying. Waste of bloody time!

[dataDave]

I just know there are going to be problems if/when I come to cancelling the subscription, I've been with NTL(was good)/Virgin(now ****e) since moving in there over two years ago now... they'd better not pull some annual contract bollocks on me and force-bum me for £37 a month up to December.

Also... I don't know about download speeds as I download absolutely nothing anymore, I only use the connection for WoW. I'm pretty sure my download speeds are adequate, it's just this goddamn ping/latency/response. I'll test it tonight by going on a pr0n run.

[reektan]

Being honest the 2 times I've had it I've just waited a couple weeks and then it seems to sort itself out. Other than that the service is really impressive - mad quick for what I need it for but I do admit I've not been online gaming on the PC side at all lately. If it's only started happening recently just wait it out for a little bit and see what happens. Would be interesting to see what you got jsut running a ping to bbc.co.uk at night or something as when I had issues I was getting like 40-80ms whereas now I get around 15ms which is what It should be around really.

But yeah - it's rarely worth ringing up - it's more of a wait it out procedure.

[Ian(not Ian)]

£37 PCM is the 10MB package is it not?
Beware your modem (or account) hasn't been nerfed by some stealth 'update' from Virgin. try this link to check your D/L speed.

http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/speedtest/

Myself I do this as often as possible. Result vary wildy, but should hover around the 8MB level.
Virgin has control over your bandwidth. Any 'mistake' on thier part can result in you effectively edning up with a standard account, 4MB.
Also Virgin's 'Fair Use' policy threatens to cap your speed if you DL more than 5GB a day. In practice this hasn't yet happened to me.

Also try downloading from fileplanet or somesuch and check the DL speed.
Then try downloading from Microsoft.com, any-old thing, MS's D/L speeds tend to be full-tilt, compare the results.

If it looks like your speed is hovering around 4MB, or less, no option but to ring the rascals. If you're lucky you'll get a GB call centre.

FYI best D/L speed I've seen is actually 12.5MB.

Finally, getting mega-high pings in WoW is not unheard of. I have heard my lad (in the same room) complaining of high pings in WoW, when I've been getting 25ms on Tabula Rasa. This points to router issues between WoW and us, or a WoW server issue.

[babs]

Download speeds sadly won't really affect this in the same way.

Have you tried a tracert David? If not, see if you can get hold of the IP address of the server you use, then in a dos prompt do

tracert xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

replacing the x's with that IP address. It'll show you the latency for each hop of the journey to the server so you can see where along the way it's happening. If it's in the first few hops then yeah, you can blame the ISP.

[Ian(not Ian)]

Aye tracert will show up latent hops, but not the bandwidth Virgin have allocated.
teh DL test will show if you're being capped by Virgin. No 10MB DL from MS f'r instance, yer capped most likely.

FYI the best DL speeds I've got, with a Virgin 10MB link is 12.5MB, if you're nowhere near that you seriously have to get Virgin to look into it....They may have set up your bandwidth wrongly, or are capping it, in which case your paying money for nothing.

[Ian(not Ian)]

Aye tracert will show up latent hops, just tried zdnet's DL speed test.
6.25MB/s, however a tracert to their site returns a timeout for hop #4. But the DL still sort of flies down happily around 6MB, if hop #4 is timing out, then how can I access the site at all?

tracert seems to be clouding the issue. at least with zdnet.co.uk

[dataDave]

£37 a month for that ****e (supposedly 20mb. lol.)

[reektan]

Yeah something must be up there dude - just did mine to check :

[Ian(not Ian)]

Are you using an RJ45 cable from your modem/router to your PC David? or W-fi perhaps