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My home Internet access is via Optus Cable. For a long time, Optus Cable has been a speed champion in Australian ISPs with downlink speeds that sometimes approach 6.5Mb/s. The only problem with the service is the anaemic 128kb/s uplink speed. This poor uplink speed is significant if you’re running certain types of forbidden “server,” multiple VoIP lines, or if you spend hours uploading your family photographs to Flickr.

This week, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Optus were increasing the uplink speed to 256kb/s. I browsed the Whirlpool forums to discover what people were using to test their speed, and whether the change had been rolled out. I tested my speed after resetting my cable modem and found that my uplink speed was still a very constant 128kb/s.

I browsed further and found that some Optus Cable customers were complaining that some areas had not been upgraded to the new speed, but this was often disputed. There was even a post from someone in the same area and same “exchange” as me who had recorded the new uplink speed.

I went to bed cursing Optus for singling me out for a lower quality of service. I slept fitfully.

Quality of service…. Quality of service… wooooOOooooo…

I awoke an hour later, realising what the problem was.

My Linksys WRT54G has been flashed with Sveasoft firmware. One of the reasons I did this was for the ability to prioritize certain types of application traffic. In the router configuration web pages this is called Quality of Service or QoS. Part of the process of configuring QoS is setting the uplink speed limit, so that the QoS feature knows when to start dropping low priority packets in favour of higher priority traffic. I changed this setting from 128kb/s to 256kb/s and sighed loudly.

I tested that uplink speed was increased, slapped myself in the head, and went back to sleep.