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Gamers up in arms as problems continue on the Virgin Media network.

by Stephen Coleman on 21 April 2011, 11:51

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For almost 2 months now gamers have been complaining of an unusable service from Virgin Media.

Issues range from Xbox Live marketplace content ceasing to load, profiles, messages, invites and streaming media all taking far too long to complete; and more often than not, failing to working at all. The problems even spread to Call of Duty: Black Ops, 2010's game of the year. Amongst other things, players are greeted with constant freezing, lag, error messages and have even being kicked offline completely.

Reports from World of Warcraft players, unable to download their latest patch have also flooded in.

Seemingly, it's the new P2P traffic management introduced by Virgin Media that's to blame. It's hard to understand why such a widespread problem has not been addressed in a more timely manner. We're currently awaiting a response from Virgin Media, so we'll let you know the response.

In the meantime, if you're experiencing any problems, let us know.


HEXUS Forums :: 25 Comments

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Posted by deleted - Thu 21 Apr 2011 13:38
Been having these problems since I had Virgin Media installed. As stated, Xbox Live content not loading, streaming media constantly buffering, profile views, messages and invites all incredibly slow and often failing.

I did try giving Virgin Media a call but I was told in these words “we do not support any kind of gaming service, you have a working internet connection in your house on your computer, so it's tough luck”.

Did a few days of testing with another 4 Virgin Media customers in which P2P management was switched off for us 5. Things swiftly went back to how they should be so I can without doubt say it's VM's implementation of P2P traffic management that's causing the problems outlined.

Hoping to see a fix sometime soon, otherwise I'll be forced to jump ship and seek another ISP yet again.
Posted by deleted - Thu 21 Apr 2011 13:49
Evenings/peak times is virtually unusable for anything like gaming,youtube,stream or iPlayer watching.

Its been this way for months and is no different whatever line speed you are on as the problem is they have over stretched the network so in the afternoon till midnight its unusable for above tasks.

They admit this on the phone and say its a problem of ‘high utilisation’ which means its not an actual problem with the lines its a problem of they spreading them across too many customers.

They don't actually care which is the worst thing about it as BT is so slow rolling out only upto 40mb lines that they can do w/e they want to there customers without a care in the world.

Once they actually sort all these problems out the network they use is definitely going to be better in the long run, but until then we get shafted.
Posted by deleted - Thu 21 Apr 2011 13:55
Don't confuse this issue with over utilisation.
I have a flawless connection, my ping never goes above 15ms, my conenction speed never fluctuates and there is next to zero jitter on my line.

It's all down to the new P2P traffic management introduced by VM, over utilisation is a differen't matter all together.
Posted by deleted - Thu 21 Apr 2011 15:13
Essentially mid way through March VM decided that traffic management on the downstream wasn't enough so they ninja'd in traffic management on their upload too. This however has had a big knock on with anything that uses P2P, ie the CoD games of late, steam to some respect suffers.

This also has caused issue's with video streaming too as they have traffic managed/throttled all traffic now instead of just those heavy downloaders etc.

This was shown to be the case when the testers over last weekend had traffic management removed from their accounts. Everything went back to normal. Come Tuesday when they were out back on the management and off the testing they all started to suffer the issue's again with gaming both PC and consoles. Virgin did their usual it seems, deny it, threads popped up on their forums and they deleted them then a mass rush of posts appeared and they had to look at it. Even their support lines refuse there is a problem and that gaming isn't supported on their networks.

Personally it hammers me on the 360 using the dash and downloading trials etc on the 20mb line but PC is relatively untouched bar the likes of battlnet/sc2 updates and the odd game of MW2 with that crappy IWNet.
Posted by deleted - Thu 21 Apr 2011 15:18
my superhubs running beta 26 firmware to fix the streaming issues. i wonder if its related to the managment issue on p2p ?

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