Nearly 2 Weeks of Latency Woes for Virgin Media UK Users in Surrey UPDATE

Customers of Virgin Media’s cable broadband ISP in Surrey, as well as potentially a few other parts of South East England, have for nearly two weeks been suffering from high latency times to servers in the EU (as well as a few in the UK). This has been particularly disruptive to online multiplayer games.

The problem (likely to be a network routing issue) appears to have started on around 7th June 2018 and results in high latency (ping) times that tend to fluctuate from between around 100ms to 1000ms+ (milliseconds), albeit mostly when connecting to European based servers (websites, video games etc.) and particularly during peak periods.

Sadly Virgin Media’s front line support staff initially spent over a week denying there was a problem and refusing to update their service status page. We had planned to write about this at the end of last week but then some helpful forum support agents finally stepped in on Friday, made a few tweaks to Virgin’s network and for a brief period the problem appeared to be resolved.

As you can probably guess, that fix didn’t last too long and on Saturday the complaints began again.

VM Customer Uli said:

“My friend on VM up in Liverpool doesn’t seem to be impacted with the high ping issue and like you said it’s just going to European servers. It’s 100% due to routing with one of the hops/nodes being screwed up.

Connecting to a server in Chicago gives me 110ms ping, connecting to one in Europe during peak time gives >1,000ms, right now pinging Google is yielding 500ms.”

VM Customer Snookieboy said:

“How much longer is this service status fraud going to go on for? Virgin, Admit you have a fault publicly on the Service Status because the fact other customers are all directing your customers here to this thread publicly on twitter and facebook after your support teams failed to assist them makes you look terrible.

I think we can all be thankful the fact that Fortnite hosts its EU Servers in the Mainland, because if it wasn’t the fact everyone seems to be playing it and noticing 1000+ ms pings, I doubt this issue would have as many people noticing it and reporting it.”

VM Customer Utte said:

“Day 11 and basically all gaming and streaming is still just not possible. There was a brief period for me on Friday were it looked a little better but other than that the connection has not been fit for purpose.”

A lengthy post on Virgin’s Community Forum details the issue and there are a few other topics that may be related. Similarly a quick search of Twitter for the term “virginmedia ping” appears to turn up a fair number of unhappy customers, all reporting the same issue and most are based in or around the Surrey area.

In the meantime some subscribers have been able to get around the issue by shifting traffic off Virgin Media’s network and pushing it over a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or optimized gaming network service, like Outfox, although naturally they’d all prefer not to have to pay extra just to avoid bad routing on the ISP’s network.

We have already reached out to the provider for a comment and are awaiting their response. In fairness, all broadband providers will from time to time suffer such issues, although they’re usually spotted and resolved quite quickly. NOTE: This has nothing to do with the known latency bug on Virgin’s Hub 3.0 router.

UPDATE 19th June 2018 (8:45am):

At present Virgin Media has not been able to provide us with a comment because they said the issue is still be investigated in order to fully identify the cause. We’ve been promised an update once more is known.