Guide - Getting the most out of your high speed Virgin Media (UPC) 240mb/s service

Fakman87

Lads I have followed all the steps up to 14 and have the C8 working now. The problem is that when I try step 14 and include Google DNS servers in it, it cuts off my internet when I save it. Anyone have this problem?

soomro

soomro wrote: »

I have UPC 240MB using Technicolor TC7200 modem/router, i had the same issue as not getting download speed more than 40MB over wifi. I followed this thread and bought TP Link Archer C2 and followed the steps in thread to setup both router few months ago and was happy by using 2.4GHz and 5GHz with good speed of 70-80MB over wifi.

UPC router IP address 192.168.0.1 - WIFI turned off

Archer IP address 192.168.1.1

Archer Getting IP address from UPC e.g 192.168.0.5
GW : 192.168.0.1

Connected LAN cable from UPC modem to Internet port of Arhcer - Assigned IP LAN range 192.168.1.100 - 192.168.1.200 with DHCP "ON" and all phones and computers were connected through Archer and was assigning IP addresses from Archer.
Recently I bought Wifi printer and unable to print via wifi and unable to ping one pc to other PC in ip range of 192.168.1.100 - 192.168.1.200

Currently turned off Archer and Turn on wifi of UPc modem, PCs are assigned IP addresses from 102.168.0.X range and able to print over wifi and also able to ping pc to pc.

Please advise where am I doing wrong?

Maybe place Archer as a static ip 192.168.0.2
Then place that IP in the DMZ on the TC2700

Basically the UPC box is just the WAN connection and the Archer is doing DHCP and the LAN connections, so all devices should be only connected to the Archer device....

soomro

Thanks NoDrama, but can't find DMZ in TC2700

Current Basic settings on TC2700- Basic Tab
Local Area Network
IP Address 192.168.0.1
Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0
DHCP Enabled
Starting Local Address 192.168.0.10
DHCP Pool 245

Skygord

I've just received delivery of a Ubee Evw3226 from Virgin today.

Initial checks show excellent speeds. But I cannot see how/where I can reserve IP addresses for devices within my network - e.g. a couple of Network drives that I use are referenced by another system by their IP address (they need the same one every time).

Also is it only possible to use 2.4GHz OR 5Ghz wireless one or the other, or is there a setting to make both available at the same time?

Have I been sent a crappy router? I was promised I'll get the Virgin Media Hub, but this was delivered instead. Happy with the speeds though.

ED E

Its not capable of using 2.4 and 5 simultaneously. Single radio.

Dunno what its lan settings are like, but its not impossible that such things would be totally absent.

plib

Hi all,

Previously on 120Megabit connection with HD tv box + phone. Modem/router was the Cisco 3925. PC has Win7 and a Netgear WNA3100 N300 USB Wifi adapter. It worked lovely - most of the time I got great download rates ( mostly full blast) via this wifi connection - up to ~13Megabytes/sec. Happy days.....

I succumbed to the 240Mb...same price as previous setup, but gained the mobile phonecalls free as an extra. So! Horizon box! Not so good! PC + wifi adapter is the same. The wifi adapter "genie" utility tells me I have Excellent signal (5 bars!) link to the Horizon box, but the connection speed varies between 18Megabits to 150 Megabits (all with 5 bars signal strength!). Currently it's showing 162megabits.

But my download rates bear no resemblance to the wifi connection speed. I've been seeing max of 300 kilobytes/sec variable down to 50kb/sec. Downloads have terminated/failed. Royal PITA!! If I connect my laptop via Ethernet cable to the Horizon box my download rate (for the same files/site show up as 27megabytes/sec! That's full speed! Varoom! Wow! So I've been toying with following BKs' guide with an external router.

Some things I've noticed - On the Horizon webApp Basic/Local Area Network there's an item "DHCP Server" enabled/disabled. Of course "enabled" is selected, and I haven't attempted changing it yet. The question is - is this the same as "Bridge Mode" or "bridging" if I select "DHCP Server" to "disabled"?

'course I still have to choose a router and wifi adapter. Looks like I gotta read the whole thread again!

Any comments and advice welcome.

Regards,
Philip

dpjmie

plib wrote: »

Hi all,

Previously on 120Megabit connection with HD tv box + phone. Modem/router was the Cisco 3925. PC has Win7 and a Netgear WNA3100 N300 USB Wifi adapter. It worked lovely - most of the time I got great download rates ( mostly full blast) via this wifi connection - up to ~13Megabytes/sec. Happy days.....

I succumbed to the 240Mb...same price as previous setup, but gained the mobile phonecalls free as an extra. So! Horizon box! Not so good! PC + wifi adapter is the same. The wifi adapter "genie" utility tells me I have Excellent signal (5 bars!) link to the Horizon box, but the connection speed varies between 18Megabits to 150 Megabits (all with 5 bars signal strength!). Currently it's showing 162megabits.

But my download rates bear no resemblance to the wifi connection speed. I've been seeing max of 300 kilobytes/sec variable down to 50kb/sec. Downloads have terminated/failed. Royal PITA!! If I connect my laptop via Ethernet cable to the Horizon box my download rate (for the same files/site show up as 27megabytes/sec! That's full speed! Varoom! Wow! So I've been toying with following BKs' guide with an external router.

Some things I've noticed - On the Horizon webApp Basic/Local Area Network there's an item "DHCP Server" enabled/disabled. Of course "enabled" is selected, and I haven't attempted changing it yet. The question is - is this the same as "Bridge Mode" or "bridging" if I select "DHCP Server" to "disabled"?

'course I still have to choose a router and wifi adapter. Looks like I gotta read the whole thread again!

Any comments and advice welcome.

Regards,
Philip

Dhcp is just the ability to dynamically distribute info like up address subnet mask gateway and dns settings... if you disable these.. you have to assign them statically per device.. it is not the same as bridge mode as far as I know but I have a setup with an archer c9 where I've disabled everything on virgin router and used lab cabled directly to the c9's Internet port and get great speed. I have Dhcp on the archer running...

Dpjmie

ED E

Yeah, don't kill DHCP or youll find yourself disconnected. When a new unit is set up and ready you then disable DHCP on the Horizon unit as the one thing you dont want is two DHCP servers running together.

Look for a good deal on a C8 or C9, you dont really need to bridge just configure it as a wireless AP to fix your wireless issues.

Fakman87

Lads since I set up the C8 I'm getting close to 240 wireless whereas on the horizon box I was only getting around 40. However sometimes when streaming I'm actually getting slower buffering now with the C8. Any idea what could be causing that?

dpjmie

Fakman87 wrote: »

Lads since I set up the C8 I'm getting close to 240 wireless whereas on the horizon box I was only getting around 40. However sometimes when streaming I'm actually getting slower buffering now with the C8. Any idea what could be causing that?

Just a guess, but check the mtu on both horizon box and c8 and make sure they are the same... otherwise packets would be split up when travelling from one to another....

Dpjmie

dpjmie

Fakman87 wrote: »

Lads since I set up the C8 I'm getting close to 240 wireless whereas on the horizon box I was only getting around 40. However sometimes when streaming I'm actually getting slower buffering now with the C8. Any idea what could be causing that?

Also depending how they are set up it could be cause double Nat..

Dpjmie

plib

dpjmie, BK and others -

A heads up on my progress so far:-

Took delivery of a Netgear R6400 wifi router and ASUS ac56 USB wifi adapter last Friday (April 1st - April Fools day. DOH!!) The netgear was the same price as the Archer C9. I thought it would take some time (notwithstanding BKs' excellent guide - thank you.) as my experience with network setup is of the "It's a bloody BLACK ART!" or " It works! Horray! Now, how did I do that!!??" type of thing. I decided to leave the router 'till Monday as I had a few things to do over the weekend - but - let's have a go at connecting the wifi adapter - yeah RIGHT!

Up to that I've been using a Netgear WNA3100 n type USB wifi adapter (USB2). disconnected it, uninstalled associated software, rebooted, connected the ASUS to a USB3 port, ran the included CD - which included a desktop utility plus drivers. Also, I was asked to install ASMedia ASM104x USB3.0 Host Controller Driver. The ASUS Utility looks nice but it couldn't see the attached adapter. A bit of Googling had me uninstalling ZoneAlarm to get it to work.

Looking at the details shown by the ASUS utility I see that I can now connect to the Horizons 2.4 & 5GHz bands. It tells me that I'm connected to the 2.4GHz at 144Megabits or the 5GHZ at 270Megabits with very little variation in either case. I liked the sound of that.
Some problems started to crop up, though. Sometimes I lost connection to the USB3 sockets (and also link to wireless/Horizon). Some programs wouldn't shut down for me. When shutting down the PC to reboot, that just wasn't happening. Had to switch off at the wall socket. Internet speed tests were still a disappointment. Something like 18Megabits/sec max (ASUS adapter/ Horizon). No point in testing a large file download!

Monday I started with the Netgear R6400 Router. It had an AP mode available (recommended if setting up via its' Setup Wizard) So after much previous faffing around I took that route. I don't know how many times I reset the netgear to factory defaults and restarted from scratch. As I said, I ended up letting the Wizard setup as AP mode. It asked could the main router switch off Wifi ( with a view towards setting up its own wifi networks using the original routers SSIDs & passwords), I elected that it couldn't, thus keeping the default Netgear SSIDs. I imagine when things settle down for me I'll switch off the Horizon Wifi.

The details from the ASUS utility now tell me that I'm connected to the Netgears 2.4GHz band at 216Megabits or the 5GHz band at 837Megabits with (again!) very little variation. Looks good. Well - the possibilities anyway! Still had the problem of losing connection to USB3 ports, PC not shutting down, programs not responding. Internet speeds - I'm not going to say, except they were worse..................! It's weird! The upload speed was always showing as 24Megabits/sec, but the download speed less!!!!????

I decided to reconnect the ASUS adapter to a USB2 port to see if that made any difference. Oh! Hey, look! This might be it! Quick, check internet speedtest. 8ms, 244Mbit download, 24Mbit upload...... via 5Ghz Wifi link!!!......shhhh, don't say anthing, maybe it'll stay at that!

So! Currently I've got the Horizon (Wifi still on for the moment) router DHCP on, linked to the Netgear 6400 using the supplied Cat5E cable, Netgear in AP mode(DHCP off) with its' Wifi on. Seems to work ok. I've set up some static IPs on the Horizon router for Printer and my PC and laptop. Now let's see if they can talk to each other..................

plib

dpjmie, BK and others -

A heads up on my progress so far:-

Took delivery of a Netgear R6400 wifi router and ASUS ac56 USB wifi adapter last Friday (April 1st - April Fools day. DOH!!) The netgear was the same price as the Archer C9. I thought it would take some time (notwithstanding BKs' excellent guide - thank you.) as my experience with network setup is of the "It's a bloody BLACK ART!" or " It works! Horray! Now, how did I do that!!??" type of thing. I decided to leave the router 'till Monday as I had a few things to do over the weekend - but - let's have a go at connecting the wifi adapter - yeah RIGHT!

Up to that I've been using a Netgear WNA3100 n type USB wifi adapter (USB2). disconnected it, uninstalled associated software, rebooted, connected the ASUS to a USB3 port, ran the included CD - which included a desktop utility plus drivers. Also, I was asked to install ASMedia ASM104x USB3.0 Host Controller Driver. The ASUS Utility looks nice but it couldn't see the attached adapter. A bit of Googling had me uninstalling ZoneAlarm to get it to work.

Looking at the details shown by the ASUS utility I see that I can now connect to the Horizons 2.4 & 5GHz bands. It tells me that I'm connected to the 2.4GHz at 144Megabits or the 5GHZ at 270Megabits with very little variation in either case. I liked the sound of that.
Some problems started to crop up, though. Sometimes I lost connection to the USB3 sockets (and also link to wireless/Horizon). Some programs wouldn't shut down for me. When shutting down the PC to reboot, that just wasn't happening. Had to switch off at the wall socket. Internet speed tests were still a disappointment. Something like 18Megabits/sec max (ASUS adapter/ Horizon). No point in testing a large file download!

Monday I started with the Netgear R6400 Router. It had an AP mode available (recommended if setting up via its' Setup Wizard) So after much previous faffing around I took that route. I don't know how many times I reset the netgear to factory defaults and restarted from scratch. As I said, I ended up letting the Wizard setup as AP mode. It asked could the main router switch off Wifi ( with a view towards setting up its own wifi networks using the original routers SSIDs & passwords), I elected that it couldn't, thus keeping the default Netgear SSIDs. I imagine when things settle down for me I'll switch off the Horizon Wifi.

The details from the ASUS utility now tell me that I'm connected to the Netgears 2.4GHz band at 216Megabits or the 5GHz band at 837Megabits with (again!) very little variation. Looks good. Well - the possibilities anyway! Still had the problem of losing connection to USB3 ports, PC not shutting down, programs not responding. Internet speeds - I'm not going to say, except they were worse..................! It's weird! The upload speed was always showing as 24Megabits/sec, but the download speed less!!!!????

I decided to reconnect the ASUS adapter to a USB2 port to see if that made any difference. Oh! Hey, look! This might be it! Quick, check internet speedtest. 8ms, 244Mbit download, 24Mbit upload...... via 5Ghz Wifi link!!!......shhhh, don't say anthing, maybe it'll stay at that!

So! Currently I've got the Horizon (Wifi still on for the moment) router DHCP on, linked to the Netgear 6400 using the supplied Cat5E cable, Netgear in AP mode(DHCP off) with its' Wifi on. Seems to work ok. I've set up some static IPs on the Horizon router for Printer and my PC and laptop. Now let's see if they can talk to each other..................


Regards,
Philip

Damien360

Should you not have DHCP off on horizon with fixed IP and its wifi off. Then on netgear have it do all the routing with its DHCP on and it's wifi on. Turn off firewall on horizon and have it on with netgear. Horizon box is therefore just a modem.

Netgear to horizon box via Ethernet cable and every other subsequent connection should be to netgear.

plib

Hi Damien,

All I can say is that it appears to work. Horizon LAN port to Netgear WAN port. The Horizon with Firewall and DHCP ON, with static IPs specified for PC, Laptop, Printer and the Netgear Router. Other IPs as required (dynamic). PC and laptop talk to each other ok, and wifi printer works from any. The Netgear in AP mode, firewall off (I think). I even have a propriety server on the PC transferring data to/ from an IPAD or smartphone.

An my internet speedtest on the PC via wifi are in the order of 240Mb download, same as wired.

Time will tell.............

Regards,
Philip

ciaran75

Hi guys,

Just received the Archer C9 and want to set up using the 'Optional Extra Steps' from guide as have Xbox one.

Quick question regarding DHCP settings? Would below work?
Virgin - IP 192.168.0.1 DHCP 192.168.0.03 - 192.168.0.99
C9 - IP 192.168.0.2 (static) DHCP 192.168.0.100 - 192.168.0.199

Thanks
Ciaran

ED E

ciaran75 wrote: »

Hi guys,

Just received the Archer C9 and want to set up using the 'Optional Extra Steps' from guide as have Xbox one.

Quick question regarding DHCP settings? Would below work?
Virgin - IP 192.168.0.1 DHCP 192.168.0.03 - 192.168.0.99
C9 - IP 192.168.0.2 (static) DHCP 192.168.0.100 - 192.168.0.199

Thanks
Ciaran

Yes if the C9 is just acting as an access point, No if its being used as a router.

ciaran75

Hi All,

i've followed steps 1 - 11 and everything is working great, getting 238Mb down, 25 up.

When i attempt to do steps 12 - 15 i get the following when i attempt to change IP to static (192.168.0.2) Anybody know what i'm doing wrong?

Error code: 5005
Bad DNS Server IP address, please input another IP address.
for example: 202.96.134.188.

Plan to use archer C9 as router

Thanks,
Ciaran

moggser

howerya's, just wondering if any of you can tell me is there any small changes on the virgin router to make upon set up to make it better i know i wont get the 240 MB im supposed to but not getting 100 even

beauf

How are you connecting to it.

moggser

Wired and wireless/

mass_debater

moggser wrote: »

Wired and wireless/

What speed is the network card in your pc? Chances are it's only 100mbit Ethernet, not gigabit

moggser

mass_debater wrote: »

What speed is the network card in your pc? Chances are it's only 100mbit Ethernet, not gigabit

ok how do i check that>?

mass_debater

moggser wrote: »

ok how do i check that>?

If you're using Windows check the status page of the network connection.

moggser

says 72.2MB

mass_debater

moggser wrote: »

says 72.2MB

That's wireless leading me to believe it only supports wireless n which would give results of about 100. What does the wired network card say?

moggser

says 100

mass_debater

moggser wrote: »

says 100

There you go then. You'll need faster hardware

moggser

grand thanks, for your help

moggser

mass_debater wrote: »

There you go then. You'll need faster hardware

How're ya just a quick one is it expensive to upgrade the wifi card? What do I look for for eg