Virgin Super Hub. Anything I should know?

[Dos_Box]

Ah, found this on one the VM forums:

 

Virgin Media has published the download and upload traffic management constraints that will accompany the new "double" speeds as they roll out. Full details at thinkbroadband.com, but here are the XXL limitations:

XXL 50Mbps and XL60: If you download more than 5Gb between 4pm and 9am your download speed will be halved for five hours, if you upload more than 12Gb you'll have to put up with operating at 25% of your normal speed for five hours. XXL 100Mbps customers hit their speed bumps at 10Gb on the download and 12Gb on the upload.

Now I'm not a heavy downloading demon so these won't affect me (half of 100mb will be the speed I currently enjoy and I don't need 100mb to be truthful) but many will be unhappy.

What makes me very unhappy at the moment is the unreliability of the broadband in South East London of late: up and down on a daily basis after years of stability and where once I had an impressive 48mbps I'm seeing speeds of half that. I'm told by CS that it's due to the engineering going on (we're due for the speed doubling in July) but the nightly loss of service is turning out to be a huge problem for my daughter's exam prep. Come on Virgin, sort it out please!

 

 

So I download 5GB and get throttled to 30Mbps. Erm, I think I can live with that

[OB1]

Virgin's traffic management policy can be found here

[Dos_Box]

Ah, reading the link info (thinkbroadband :: Virgin Media updates traffic management policy to reflect new products), I get a 4.2GB limit and get reduced to 15Mbps. Which is still 5meg faster than my last 'top whack' speed.

[mac_shinobi]

Ah, reading the link info (thinkbroadband :: Virgin Media updates traffic management policy to reflect new products), I get a 4.2GB limit and get reduced to 15Mbps. Which is still 5meg faster than my last 'top whack' speed.

 

Maybe just me but find it annoying that they advertise as the fastest etc but then only let you download a dvd worth or just over and then throttle you back down to 15 mbps or below.

 

Why make a big fuss about got the fastest, got the fastest but then put your connection back to the stone after downloading a dvd worth. I'm on the 60mbps connection and only seems after a certain point at night when it goes back to a better speed / bandwidth etc vs between 10 and 3pm in the day where it goes seriously slow

[hardtailstar]

Ive got the super Hub, Wireless is pants it just about goes half way through house so whacked in a Cat 5 cable and ran it upstairs to the old Virgin wireless router and used that for upstairs wireless,

 

No problems at all!

 

but my friends with a superhub has a weekly problem of it not working.

[synaesthesia]

Look up the virgin media forums - ignore most of my rants on their about wanting to string the cheating morons up by the short and curlies, and you'll only be left with "Why is my super-hub so utterly awful" posts. Thousands of them. Can't comment on it myself, i've only got the last gen netgear thing of theirs (VMDG280) which is fairly diabolical and needs a daily restart for wireless to work.

[mac_shinobi]

Look up the virgin media forums - ignore most of my rants on their about wanting to string the cheating morons up by the short and curlies, and you'll only be left with "Why is my super-hub so utterly awful" posts. Thousands of them. Can't comment on it myself, i've only got the last gen netgear thing of theirs (VMDG280) which is fairly diabolical and needs a daily restart for wireless to work.

 

Phoned them and explained that I had gone through all the forum posts with regards to all possible tweaks / changes that could be made and wireless is still faulty and they only gave me £10 credit just for that one month and the offer of a new superhub ( which at that point I had already done twice and still had the same issue )

 

As per previous page and other suggestions I have enabled modem mode and use my own router

 

Works now although there are a lot of 2.4 Ghz Wi-Fi networks around and up the road from @synaesthesia and I find it too congested on all channels, works nicely sometimes but most of the time its just dog slow with all the congestion.

 

My 5 Ghz wireless network is great as can't see any 5 Ghz networks around.

[synaesthesia]

aye there is a few, I've managed to isolate mine well enough channel-wise but it's just general reliability from the router - can't even use it if you're right next to it sometimes :| Never mind, Sky LLU is now available here and it's a damned slight better package than Virgin

[mac_shinobi]

aye there is a few, I've managed to isolate mine well enough channel-wise but it's just general reliability from the router - can't even use it if you're right next to it sometimes :| Never mind, Sky LLU is now available here and it's a damned slight better package than Virgin

 

Link to sky LLU ? or you just mean any sky broadband package ??

[synaesthesia]

Just standard sky, we're going for the full caboodle with them. Plus hell of a lot of cashback via quidco too.

[Gibbo]

I got my VM upgraded last week and am not impressed with the wireless range of the "Super" hub.

 

I was looking into using the old Netgear WGR614 that they provided - I've flashed the firmware back to Netgear from their Virgin concoction courtesy of this site and was looking into the Wireless Repeating Function and siting the old router somewhere in the middle of the house.

[Dos_Box]

I like the SuperHub. Well, up to a point. I really like the speed on 5Ghz, but 2.4 is far too cluttered around here now, and I can download at 5 MBps. Hell, 10 years ago I was lucky to get 5 Kbps, I can't wait to see where we are in another 10 years.

I don't like the crippled UI on the SH, or the fact I can't use the 2.4 and 5Ghz bands side by side, so I can't connect my phone to the wireless at home without a large amount of faffing. With the SH it's either one band or the other, and I'm sorely tempted to bring in one of the Ruckus AP's from the office. The SH is OK, but I wish they hadn't dumbed it down.

[Zoom7000]

My brother and my friend both have the SuperDud, or the PooperHub as they call it respectively and both have complained about absolutely terrible wireless performance. In fact, when they've complaining to Virgin, the advice tech support have given has been along the lines of... "oh, run the SuperHub in modem only mode and use another router for wireless..."

 

Err... why can't you just supply a router that works?! And are you gonna pay for the extra router I need to buy?!

Edited May 2, 2012 by Zoom7000

[Dos_Box]

I can see a pattern forming here

Well, following said pattern, can anyone recommend a decent dual band router?

 

Edited to add: That won't break the bank!

[nicklec]

wow depressing thread, looks like modem mode and sticking to my dd-wrt router then...

[januttall]

one of our employes has gone through 3 when he managed to prove to them that it was there box. and they told him to do the same after the 3rd replacement.

[Dos_Box]

I'm reading an interesting discussion about the SH here: Virgin Media Super Hub - Cable Forum it's a bit of a long thread and I'm only a few pages in. Some of the main discussion is just what it is based on - Netgear - hardware-wise to compare features, and more importantly to find out just what has been disabled as it is almost certain to be a 'standard' board and chipset with custom firmware/case and network ports.

As I've said, currently I have not had an issue with it and am quite happy with it's performance, it's just the annoyance of having a dual band router that only makes one band at a time available.

[Dos_Box]

A better discussion can be found here: Superhub What hardware versions / revisions of the superhub are there? - Page 7 - Cable Forum With some interesting snippets such as this:-

 

However the last device was, as you said yourself, supposed to be a second supplier for the Superhub 1, and a device that in practice, would perform the same as the original Superhub.

 

This new "Superhub 2" sounds like it's actually based on newer-generation hardware, and vastly improved over the outdated legacy components in the Superhub 1. That aside, the current Superhub would be hard pressed to hit 100mbps over wireless, let alone 200, and I believe even hardwired it won't do 400.

 

In my opinion, after 200mbps VM would have to replace the Superhub anyway, and as far as I'm concerned the sooner they do it the better.

 

Interestingly, Broadcom claim the BCM3383 is 50% faster than what came before, yet only runs at 500Mhz, suggesting the Superhub 1's CPU runs at 333Mhz. I've seen routers with 384Mhz MIPS processors become CPU bottlenecked when transmitting over wireless, in just single-band configurations.

 

Back of the envelope calculations suggest that an 800Mhz-1Ghz MIPS CPU to be the required minimum to efficiently operate concurrent dual-band wireless without the processor being a bottleneck. A multi-threaded/multi-core 500Mhz like the BCM3383 would obviously also do the trick. I do know however 684Mhz ARM processors are too slow to run dual-band concurrent wireless properly. The 333Mhz MIPS in the Superhub is thus in my opinion is barely sufficient to handle single-band wireless-N.

 

I do wonder then, if the Superhub's lack of dual-band concurrent wireless was impacted by the fact that VM put a processor in the Superhub that is simply too slow to handle it, similarly, its performance even single band could have been impacted by having a processor just barely fast enough to deal with it.

 

It seems that many of the performance issues could be processor related.

[Gibbo]

As I've said, currently I have not had an issue with it and am quite happy with it's performance, it's just the annoyance of having a dual band router that only makes one band at a time available.

 

When I'm in the same room, it's great. No issues at all. It's only when I move to another that the performance is terrible. Now I live in a Victorian house with solid brick walls. But when the cheapo little white Netgear they bundled with the old package is outperforming it, then something is not right.

[Dos_Box]

There is discussion on the last forum I linked too about the location of the internal antennas being poorly implemented so if the SH is near a wall, radiator, fresh air, the signal suffers dreadfully. In fact this here from Virgin: http://help.virginmedia.com/system/selfservice.controller?CMD=VIEW_ARTICLE&ARTICLE_ID=345049&CURRENT_CMD=SEARCH&CONFIGURATION=1002&PARTITION_ID=1&USERTYPE=1&LANGUAGE=en&COUNTY=us&VM_CUSTOMER_TYPE=Cable

 

Try to keep the Super Hub as far as you can from:

• Large or dense objects – avoid items containing metal or water
  
• Reflective or shiny surfaces – the signal can bounce off windows, mirrors and tiles
  
• Electrical equipment – particularly TVs, cordless phones, baby monitors and other equipment that sends out radio signals
  
• Walls – especially thick ones made of concrete or brick
  

Other things to think about:

• Give it space – the more space immediately around your Super Hub, the better its signal can spread
  
• Keep the front clear – your Super Hub broadcasts from its front panel (the side with the illuminated Virgin Media button), so try not hide it away on a bookshelf or behind the TV
  

 

Mine is behind the TV, against the wall and next to a radiator. Hmmm.

[HodgeHi]

Yeah radiators are the biggest killers of Wi-Fi signals as you are all probably aware. Also you should have WAPs as high up as possible. to allow the signal to go overheads. Difficult to do this in a home environment though. Sometimes you just don't have the choice where you put stuff.

 

My Mother-in law's house has an extension and if you walk from the kitchen to the extension with a laptop the signal dies instantly as soon as you step over the threshold. I also had to reboot her WifI router the other day - a netgear one.

[Moos3h]

I had to downgrade the speed of my router as packets were getting dropped - now I have though, it's working well and fast enough for everything I need. Bit odd though.

[andyturpie]

Had my superhub since Friday 4th May and non of the issues mentioned have arose yet

[januttall]

According to a Virgin Engener You have to set the channel and this fixes the issue, He sugested Chnnl 11-13 or 1-3 as there isnt asmuch on these channels.

wether this works is debateable as i havent tryed it according to a frend it dosent, but what do you expect from cheep netgear products. Sorry any diehard NetGear fans. [FYI the superhub is a Netgear Product]

Edited May 8, 2012 by januttall

[Mcshammer_dj]

There is discussion on the last forum I linked too about the location of the internal antennas being poorly implemented so if the SH is near a wall, radiator, fresh air, the signal suffers dreadfully. In fact this here from Virgin: Troubleshooting the Virgin Media Super Hub

 

Mine is behind the TV, against the wall and next to a radiator. Hmmm.

 

At last I see the problems that I have, I have an older house which is stupidly made of a series of brick walls with Radiators fitted to the brick walls. I need to get the brick walls replaced with wood and paper and than remove the stupid radiators which seem to only be used to heat the house..........