Hi Matt,

That sounds suspiciously like an MTU issue in the Virgin Media Network - I
had this happen to one of my core network links when VM made a mistake on a
configuration change.

Have you tried checking the size of pings you can send to various IPv4
addresses without fragmentation?

I can't help you get in touch with Virgin Media though I'm afraid!

Paul

On Fri, 3 Jul 2020 at 15:19, Matt Carlin <[email protected]> wrote:

> Evening all,
>
> I hope an email of this nature is allowed, but I apologise if it's not
> (though I would still appreciate the help!)
>
> I'm hoping to bring to someone's attention a network issue which started
> Sunday evening and is affecting parts of North London (N13, N14, N21 and
> surroundings). I work in IT so I consider myself to be quite technical, but
> there's only so much I can do as a consumer in this situation and I don't
> know anyone who works for Virgin.
>
> My suspicion - based on our symptoms - is that there's a localised DNS or
> routing issue affecting the areas I mentioned. Symptoms include slow or
> failing DNS resolution and slow or failing connections to a range of
> servers/services (WebEx, Zoom, Discord, my Citrix desktop using Citrix
> Workspace). Actual download speeds, latency, and jitter all seem fine when
> I use speed test websites (when I manage to get onto them), and I can
> download large files at full speeds (when I manage to establish a
> connection to the server). Using different DNS settings on my devices does
> not work (verified by other people), but using a VPN to tunnel out of
> Virgin's network does mostly get around the DNS resolution and connection
> issues (also verified by other people), albeit not perfect. The fact that
> using a VPN gets around the issues for the most part is why I think it's
> DNS/routing, but I'm not a network engineer so I'm happy to be better
> educated on the subject.
>
> Dozens - if not hundreds - of people are complaining about these issues on
> social media and the Virgin Media forums, but the complaints are falling on
> deaf ears. Customer service reps try to connect to our Virgin hubs and see
> them offline when they are actually very much online - but this is because
> of the aforementioned issues. They did put out an incident number for the
> area on Tuesday, but I was told that an "engineer" went out to investigate
> and couldn't see any problems, so they lifted the incident status... I
> continue bashing my head against a wall trying to get these issues properly
> escalated to a team that can actually troubleshoot DNS and networking
> problems, but no one seems interested in hearing what I'm saying.
>
> I sincerely apologise for the ranty nature of my email, but it's been an
> extremely frustrating experience, especially while trying to work from home
> in these times. I'm just reaching out to see if there's anyone here who
> works for Virgin Media, or knows someone who does, and if they'd be kind
> enough to look into these issues on behalf of myself and several post
> code's worth of people in North London.
>
> I'm happy to be contacted off list if anyone fancies reaching out.
>
> Thank you for reading.
>
> Matt  Carlin
>
>

-- 
Paul Bone
Network Consultant

PMB Technology

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