Virgin Media Broadband Customers See Peak Time Latency Woes Return

Customers on Virgin Media’s UK cable broadband platform report that problems with high latency during peak times, which first struck the ISP last month when one of its public peering providers (Atrato) suddenly switched most of its traffic flow, appear to have returned.

Last time the problem was caused when Atrato began pushing “abnormal amounts of traffic” through Virgin Media’s public peering links at LINX (London Internet Exchange), which overloaded them and caused a spate of slow speeds and high latency (ping) woes. This time the situation doesn’t yet appear to be as widespread or aggressive, although it has persisted for the past few days.

Virgin’s Help and Support Forum Manager, Mark Wilkin, has apologised for the problem “cropping up again” and confirmed that the ISP is “seeing problems on LINX again“. A fault number of F002228652 has already been assigned to the issue. The problem itself can make it extremely difficult to play fast-paced multiplayer games or to use some other time sensitive online applications.

The original Virgin Community Forum topic can be found here.