Internet intermittently slowing down to a crawl

Brendan Burgess

Founder
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54,773
I am a Virgin Media customer.

My internet connection has been fine, but recently it has slowed down.

I have tried
1) switching off the modem and switching it back on.
2) Pressing the reset button

It works ok for a while but then slows down again.
 
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OK, I rang Virgin Media.

(Although they said the wait time was 20 minutes, they answered in 4 minutes.)

She said that as the modem is 4 years old, it could be a fault in the modem.

So she is sending me out a new one.

Brendan
 


I pressed the reset button and now it's



About an hour later - I didn't do anything else to the modem.

 
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Unlikely to be the modem and more likely to be contention, or the number of other people sharing whatever limited bandwidth they have in the area.
 
Hi Leo

That is interesting. So rebooting or resetting my modem has no effect. It just gets better of its own accord and I make the false association between resetting and an improvement?

I will ask my neighbours if they are Virgin users and if they are experiencing problems.

Brendan
 
Are you certain that the problem is with the broadband and not with the device (laptop or tablet or phone) using the broadband?

You could try testing from different devices using the same network and see what results you get. Try it at different times of day and see if there is any pattern.
 
Hi RP.

Good idea.

Next time it's slow, I will check it with my phone to see if it's also slow.

Brendan
 
hi Brendan, those speed tests are they wired or wireless. If wired you have an issue, if wireless its either the hard ware or your wireless set up.

Ideally you would have your wifi split between 2.4g and 5g, and where you can connect to the 5g band, its range is lower but speeds are higher and its less prone to interference.
 
Wired to my laptop.

Just checked on my phone : 224 - didn't give me an upload reading.

Sorry, I don't follow the rest of your post.

Brendan
 
Brendan Burgess said:
Wired to my laptop.

Sorry, I don't follow the rest of your post.

Brendan
Click to expand...
if wired then there is an issue, replacement modem would be a start.

The second part of my post was more geared if the results were via wifi, so its advice on how to optimise your wifi speeds.
 
It may be a fault on the line, external or internal to your house Ask them to run a check on the line if you phone them again.

If its a laptop etc thats experiencing the slow down, try hotspotting to your phone and see if laptop is still slow. If ok you are isolating the issue to the wifi.

If issue persists, see if they can send out an engineer to get it checked, but they should be able to perform checks before sending someone onsite.
 
OK

So it slowed down again on my pc to 1

Checked it on my phone and it was 138

So is that telling me that it's the wired setup is the problem?

Brendan
 
I didn't change anything.. Checked it a minute later and it's back up to 248 on the laptop and 203 on the phone.


Brendan
 
Lots of people have fibreoptic connection coming to their house, but their actual house isn't wired for such a scenario.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
OK

So it slowed down again on my pc to 1

Checked it on my phone and it was 138

So is that telling me that it's the wired setup is the problem?

Brendan
Click to expand...
Generally yes, assuming you started the tests at the exact same time.
It might be worth checking the Ethernet cable between your PC and the router, and possibly replacing it if you have a spare.
Sometimes the clips on the cable jack can break, so the cable may not be fully seated - handy check is to make sure its firmly pushed in to port on PC and port on router. Also watch out for any severe kinks in the cable.
 
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