Shocking Virgin Media wifi

[Manchester77]

Has anyone else who's a Virgin media customer had a very intermittent wifi signal lately. In some cases it's just completely gone off for about five minutes. My most recent wifi speed test is less than impressive:

Was just wondering if it's a problem limited to my area (Stretford, Manchester) or whether it's effecting others?

Thanks

 

[maniacmartin]

I think you're confusing two things here.
There is the connection from your router to the the internet and also wifi connection between your laptop and the router. Both are separate things.

Virgin are well known for not delivering line speed at all times of the day, especially at peak times. If there is a bottleneck on their network, I believe they prioritise traffic from customers on more expensive internet packages over those on cheaper packages. Another forum member runs this automated twitter account, which periodically runs speedtests on his '120Mbps' (the most expensive package) where he lives. It certainly doesn't run at anywhere near that speed at peak times.

When you have a bottleneck on the Virgin network, it is likely to affect only certain areas where they haven't invested enough in the backhaul. The only way around this is to change internet provider or upgrade to a more expensive package.

If the problem is instead with the wifi specifically, which is much less likely, you can solve this by using a cable from your computer to the router, and by changing the SSID to use a less busy channel (that conflicts with your neighbour's wifi less) The 5 Ghz band is an even better option as hardly anyone uses it, but your computer and router might not support this.

By 'completely gone off for five minutes', can you describe exactly what happened and what error messages appeared?

 

[Manchester77]

Thanks I don't have the best understanding of this sort of thing so your explanation is most helpful. Thinking about it, it does tend to happen in the evening and then on into the early hours so it does look likely to be the peak hour issue as you said. The error messages which come up on my iPad tend to be 'Safari cannot connect to *website URL* because iPad is not connected to the internet' and on my main computer I get the server is not responding or error 404.

 

[maniacmartin]

or error 404.

Are you sure it's error number 404? That would indicate something different again - a mistyped URL or a page that a website owner has deleted.

 

[Manchester77]

That's what my wife said however I suspect that's just what's he can remember since it's a common knee to come up if it is the URL mistake as you said. If it comes up when I'm using it I'll try and write it down

 

[Clip]

Are you on cable or get it down the normal phone line?

http://downdetector.co.uk/problems/virgin-media