I’ve started using LiveDrive recently. The service and price seemed pretty good, although the same cannot be said about their customer service, which is, well, crap. (I’ll come back to them at a later date, they may redeem themselves, they may not).
Anyway, backing everything up to t’cloud means I’m doing a lot of uploading so I upgraded my virgin package to the 20Mb XL, which should make my uploads super quick.
As stated in this document from Virgin Media, my area has already been upgraded so I should have already been getting the 2Mb upload.
- The old upload speed on the 20Mb XL Virgin package was 768kbps
- The new upload speed on the 20Mb XL Virgin package is 2Mb – tidy!
The problem is, I’m not getting 2Mb upload, infact I’m only getting at best 768kbps up. I monitor all the traffic using PRTG and it’s never gone above 768kbps (convenient that it matches the old upload limit), not even in the middle of the night or any other time outside the throttling zones.
I emailed Virgin Media, who a day later replied telling me to call them, so I did and I spoke to Piresh in India, who basically told me there’s nothing they can do. So I spoke to his supervisor, Abdul, who told me it was my anti-virus software, genius. I mentioned that I thought maybe my modem (from information on the Virgin forums) could not support the higher speed, he assured me this was not that case and that my modem could indeed support these speeds.
After a bit of nosing around, it turns out I can access my WebSTAR EPC2100R2 modem by going to http://192.168.100.1, and would you believe it, the Upload Symbol Rate is set to 768000 bits/sec, or 768kbps.
FYI: If you want to access all the hidden pages on the modem, navigate to http://192.168.100.1/_aslvl.asp and use the password W2402 (Thanks to borfast for that)
This config is received by the modem from Virgins TFTP servers as I understand, and there seems to be a lot of confusion as to whether the webSTAR modem supports the new upload speeds or not.
So, it seems it’s not my anti-virus software after all eh Virgin?
I rang Virgin that evening and after half an hour on the phone, to a UK call centre this time, they agreed that the modem wouldn’t support the new speeds, so they’re sending me a new one, which takes 3-4 days though.
FYI: The support number (0845 454 1111) can also be access by using this local number 01256 752000 (Say no to 0870)
Update: Virgin promptly sent me a new modem, a black netgear wireless jobbie, and within a few minutes it was installed. I had to call to activate it, but after about 15 minutes I was online and up to speed, 20Mb down, 2Mb up – sweet.