>> IP Profile for your line is - 6500 Kbps
As mentioned above, that figure is an estimate of what speed you should get on your line on the BTw system.
The fact that your IP Profile is at 6500 indicates that all is well line side.
All your symptoms seem to indicate severe congestion.
With IPStream adsl (which is what weve now confirmed you are on), congestion through contention can occur at 2 places.
1) The exchange
2) The ISP central Pipes.
ExchangeYou can check your exchange status
here.
Although saying that, it should be pointed out that exchange contention usually causes just slow thoughput.
Some form of low-level QoS is performed on the MSANs and more modern DSLAMs so that latency doesnt seem to be affected.
Since maxdslI dont think Ive ever seen a case of Exchange contention causing low latency. Even way back to 2003 when our exchange kinda became famous for having extreme and severe contention and speeds right down to about 40kbps... not one of us had any problems with latency.
ISP CentralsThe only way you can check for this for sure is by using the old sytle
BTw speedtest. However it doesnt always allow access and Im not sure what impact the recent BTw tester changes will have had on it.
Virgin supplies broadband via several different methods.
- Cable - They took over the NTL cable..Normally OK although does see some local congestion from time to time. Most users are happy with this service and dont see too many problems.
- LLU - A relatively new venture for Virgin, they started moving some of their users on to this service from IPStream/DataStream due to severe congestion problems on their centrals.
- IPStream - Historically Virgin are well known to have contention & congestion problems on their centrals through oversubscription. This is when they dont purchase sufficient central pipes to keep up with the number of users that they have. Users on congested centrals report slow throughput and high latency. Virgin will deny point blank though that there are problems with their centrals even when it is obvious.. and historically they are known for not keeping up with supply and demand for IPStream... if you do searches most of Virgins complaints come from IPStream users reporting slow throughput.
Last Month.
Virgin Media recently ran an advertising campaign that some thought was a bit dubious about their claims, but it seems that many were taken in by the ads.
This caused a problem last month in that Virgin wasnt able to connect all of them in time due to delays... mostly not being able to post modems out in time.
See
Virgin Media 'overwhelmed' by broadband customers fleeing BT.
So Virgin is now seeing lots of new users - thats lots of new people now sharing their Central Pipes.
Lead time to get more BTw Centrals installed is 90 working days.. If this is whats going on.. then it could be a bumpy ride for Virgin cutomers over the next few months if Virgin havent planned properly :/
If Virgin havent planned enough modems which can be got in days/weeks. Then what are the chances that 3 or 4 months ago they planned for sufficient centrals to be ordered to accommodate these new users .
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Theres just one other thought that does occur... VM has a FUP were users who have used more than 'x' amount of bandwidth get their connection throttled. Is it possible that you may have tripped their Fair Usage Policy and are being traffic managed.
http://www.virgin.net/allyours/faqs/trafficManagementFAQ.html