Posted by11 months ago
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Check the lights on the Hub 3.0. The lights on your Hub will help identify if anything isn't working as expected. For a guide on the Hub 3.0 lights, check What the lights on your Virgin Media Hub mean. Find the best WiFi channel. WiFi networks are set to operate on a number of approved frequencies (or 'channels').
Super hub 3 VPN and torrents
tldr: VPN OK, torrent OK, VPN and torrent not OK. How?
Something's going on here. I will present my findings and let you decide.
Virgin broadband went down recently. Had a spare router unused, a super hub 3. As it was a month since they supplied it, I guessed maybe the network expected it to be used. So I called them up went through the super hub 3 set up, to see if it worked.
Didn't. Was an external connection fault at the cabinet, took them 2 days to fix. But since then, my VPN connection does weird things.
When VPN on and browsing, everything absolutely fine and dandy. Speedtests peak at 95% download and 80% upload. If a torrent app is running, the combined speed of speedtest and torrents is between 8% and 15% my supposed broadband connection. Close a torrent client, wait a few minutes, and speedtests and downloads are optimal again. Launch a torrent client while also downloading something directly from a website, then sometimes everything is fast for about a minute. This is the case WITH BOTH the superhub in MODEM and ROUTER mode !!! No issues before the outage, so it could have something to do with the outage and not the router. Suspect the router, given the other discussions online.
Affects Windows and Linux (as I expected). Torrent speed with no VPN enabled was high when getting Linux Mint.
On the face of it, it would seem that they're throttling VPN speeds when used in conjunction with torrents. It is almost as impressive as it is infuriating that they could do that! It could be a bizarre device incompatible specifically with torrents over VPN and I don't know which is most likely, intentional or accidental cause to this issue. While looking for more info I found the link to Virgin Media's official statement to the regulator that says nothing is rate limited in any way by their network.
There's a lot of talk about this on Virgin's own forum, many claims by customers and denials and rebuttals from Virgin that it isn't them. I won't post there since no sense has come from it for anyone else, and I think some of them were using torrents and VPN to download things other than Ubuntu, Libre Office and similar.
Thoughts?
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