Virgin media effectively throttling broadband connection to Linux OS

Support & Help Requests
1

I am so furious about this I thought I would share.

Just bought a house to renovate in the north East of UK. Standard copper connection is a paltry 17Mbps. However, in this particular town, Virgin Media have laid optic fibre up most streets, including mine. So, I thought I would take advantage and sign up for a 100Mbps connection.

However, as soon as I connected up, I found the connection is an outrageously slow 3 to 5 Mbps.

I have spent the last two days on the phone to Virgin Media being basically stonewalled about the speed of my connection. That is to say, they simply keep stating that the connection is running as it should be. Even to the point of more or less suggesting that I am either lying about my connection speed and/or that I should change operating systems to MS Windows. On that, they have a flat out adamant policy of refusing to hold any conversation whatsoever that contains the word “Linux”.

Never mind that I have informed that that I need no support whatsoever with Linux and that the problem is that they are throttling their connection to my Linux machines in some way.

I have since installed Windows 7 on one of my laptops and, lo and behold, the connection speed test on that laptop immediately reads at 70Mbps and above!

Utter, utter ****ing ***kers!

Anyway, I have rigged up a temporary fix by using my Windows laptop with a shared internet connection and am running an ethernet cable between that and my main Linux desktop. Thus, my Linux machine is getting it’s internet connection by ethernet based proxy of my windows laptop. At which point, of course, my Linux desktop is now reading broadband speeds of 70Mbps and above!

Are these tossers at Virgin Media actually allowed to do this? How many people have been put off Linux with a similar experience to mine?

If anyone on here has had a similar experience with Virgin media and has found a less messy solution than mine, I would be grateful to hear it.

2

That's unfortunate to hear! I can't see it being true, I don't understand why they'd even want to do this?! :confused:

I've never been with Virgin Media, but I am aware they are likely to throttle / "traffic shaping" (especially peer-to-peer/torrents) and exaggerate their advertised speeds.

My household has fibre with TalkTalk ("over the copper" - BT) and I get a third or half the speeds to my computer, all because internally my Powerline adapter and aging wireless stick hasn't got a good connection at the top of the house. :frowning: If I tether my Android phone over USB, it's blazingly fast, so this could boil down to drivers.

Do you have any other devices that this happens to? An Android (or for PC, Android x86), Chrome OS, iOS? Immediately change if the Windows laptop runs a Linux live session?

Most importantly, how would they detect this? Is it by the router or ISP level? If it's user agent, you may be able to spoof it in the web browser, Chrome/Chromium can do this quite easily in the Developer Tools (F12).

Or choose a "device" to mimic.

Out of interest, there's a thread from 2011 related to this: http://linuxforums.org.uk/index.php?topic=9341.0

3

I read that thread and most of the airy dismissals of the user having the problem are just plain wrong.

Firstly, someone says it is not Virgin becasue he is testing it on diferent rigs. Well, I can scotch that one because I tested it on one of my laptops with Ubuntu first and then Windows second. Crap speed with Ubuntu and proper speed with MS Windows. Also, this is occurring not just on my laptop, but also on my desktop and my notepad with Linux. Virgin does not want to play with LINUX. It doesn’t care about the device

4

How can they know the difference between Linux and Windoze? TCP/IP is (was?) system
independent.

I use this python script:

My ancient P3 router (running Ubuntu MATE of course:)

superman@Tonys:$ ./speedtest_cli
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration…
Retrieving speedtest.net server list…
Testing from Charter Communications
Selecting best server based on latency…
Hosted by TekLinks: 57.962 ms
Testing download speed…
Download: 64.16 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed…
Upload: 3.12 Mbit/s
superman@Tonys:$ lscpu
Architecture: i686
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 1
On-line CPU(s) list: 0
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 1
Socket(s): 1
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
CPU family: 6
Model: 8
Model name: Pentium III (Coppermine)
Stepping: 6
CPU MHz: 868.162
BogoMIPS: 1736.32

1 Like
5

Speedtest.net is the broadband speed checker I have been using already

6

The only way I know to figure out what is going on is to look at the network packets with Wireshark and then compare Linux vs. Windoze. We need to figure out why because I’m sure that other ISPs will start throttling Linux if they can. Not good!

1 Like
7

Update:

I managed, as mentioned before, to get round the Virgin Media throttling of Linux by running the internet connection through an MS Windows shared internet connection that I then ran to my Linux machine.

However, I have since discovered that Virgin are also throttling the use of VPNs and torrent downloads. This is true, irrespective of whether their use is on a windows machine, a Linux machine, or a Linux machine via a windows shared internet connection.

To put some numbers on it:

The advertised speed is “up to” 100mbps. In reality this is likely to be anywhere between 40 and 80, averaging around 50

Linux direct internet connection = 5mbps average

MS Windows direct internet connection = 50mbps average

Linux indirect internet connection via MS Windows shared internet connection = 50mbps average

Linux direct internet connection running a VPN = 5mbps average

Linux indirect internet connection running a VPN via MS Windows shared internet connection = 10mbps average

MS Windows direct internet connection running a VPN = 10mbps average

Linux direct internet connection running a torrent client = 2mbps average

Linux indirect internet connection running a torrent client via MS Windows shared internet connection = 2mbps average

MS Windows direct internet connection running a torrent client = 2mbps average

Linux direct internet connection running a VPN and torrent client = 2mbps average

Linux indirect internet connection running a VPN and torrent client via MS Windows shared internet connection = 2mbps average

MS Windows direct internet connection running a VPN and torrent client = 2mbps average

So, in summary, it looks like VPNs are being throttled to 10mbps, Linux is being throttled to 5mbps and torrent clients are being throttled to 2mbps. Thus, if you want to use Virgin media optic fibre, you need to be using MS Windows, no VPN service and no torrent client.

Sod Virgin. I’m done with them. I would rather go with a 17mbps copper wire connection.

8

I have Virgin Media cable and I haven’t had this issue. I have the VIVID200 connection with a Superhub2ac and I have none of the throttling issues. I haven’t tried VPNs but I haven’t seen throttling on either web surfing or torrents (other than what I would expect i.e. if any traffic needs to be shaped, start at the torrents, although I have had torrents at the 20MBytes/sec range)

I’ve found your Virgin Media forum post as well and can’t do much other than the suggestions they have.

If speedtest-cli still reports 5mbps while on a wired connection with different NICs, I would complain quite loudly to them as I get 155Mbits via wireless so you should get better than 5mbps.

1 Like
9

Hi John. From a bit of research, this problem seems to be linked to the new Suerhub 3. I may be able to circumvent that by putting it into modem mode and using my own router. However, that still leaves the issue of the throttling of VPNs and torrent clients. Both of which are unacceptable to me. Of course, any company is at liberty to throttle whatever service they want. My main gripe is that none of this is indicated to prospective customers, myself included.

Insofar as throttling and shaping is concerned, I guess I should call the VPN “shaped” since it drops to 10mbps but no lower. However, when "shaped to 10% of the advertised speed, the conceptual distinction between throttling and shaping is somewhat moot, in my opinion. So far as using torrent clients is concerned, the speed to drops to 2mbps or lower or even drops out completely. This is throttling by any definition. Again,. these things may be linked to the use of the Super hub 3. Though, I should say, even if I drop it into modem mode and connect directly via ethernet on an MS Windows machine, the issues with the VPN and torrent client remain,

10

Hi Steve,

report them to the Monopolies Commission for unfair practice whereby they favour one (commercial) OS over a free OS. Even if the MC tell you to get knotted, at least you had your say and make a point of letting Virgin know what you intend to do!. :smiley:

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/competition-and-markets-authority

1 Like
11

From a bit of research, this problem seems to be linked to the new Superhub 3.

Have you tried ringing Virgin and ask for a Superhub2ac?

My main gripe is that none of this is indicated to prospective customers, myself included.

Sadly, it is.

http://my.virginmedia.com/traffic-management/traffic-management-policy-30Mb-or-higher.html has this:

In addition to this, we also apply a temporary speed limit to all
peer-to-peer and Newsgroup traffic during peak times to ensure that they
do not slow the network down for everyone.

So this is probably why torrents are being throttled. VPN would still be a mystery. One solution on the VM forum was a factory reset of the Superhub. Try that.

12

They state they only throttle uploads. However, it is the download speed which is being throttled on my machine as much as the upload speed.

Our new policy is simple:

We only restrict upload speed
Your speed is only reduced while the upload threshold is exceeded. So the speed reduction could only last as little as an hour as long as you reduce your uploads

Furthermore, this was not made explicit to me at time of purchase, as I specifically asked them about traffic management.

13

I’m running Linux ( Ubuntu Mate ) , on Virgin Broadband and getting my advertised 200 Mb/s no problem.
I would look for another reason.

14

Well, since I am also running Ubuntu Mate and am also using Virgin Media optic fibre broadband but am also seeing consistent drastic reductions in speed when using Linux directly and when using VPN’s and/or torrent clients in either Windows or Linux, whilst I am happy for you, your circumstances do not advance me any further towards a solution of my problem,