Problems with Streaming Media - 4oD and ITV player in particular
well i have just watched 4od time team 
its working no probs for me.
PN extra 21cn pro add on
its working no probs for me.PN extra 21cn pro add on
I think you will find that I did clearly mention PREMIER (and my connection stats) when asking if there were any other customers who also still had this type of A/C who could try 4oD and ITV Player themselves to see if they got the same problem or not.
As for the different data sources, the basic website data appears to come from 1 source, the various adverts before a programme starts playing come from 1 or more different sources and the programme itself from yet another source. As I suggested in my various posts, it was only the programme data itself that was being severely and totally unreasonably throttled. The website itself and the various adverts generally worked without major issues. I also quoted the specific data source that never worked properly due to the excessive throttling: 88.221.84.87:1935 [a88-221-84-87.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com] as well as providing times when this happened and graphs showing the data transfer rates clearly indicating excessive and unreasonable throttling. I also said that EVERY 4oD programme I tried watching was affected and EVERY ITV Player programme I tried watching was affected but BBC iPlayer programmes were NOT affected and neither was anything else. There was no gray area or an apparent intermittent problem ... nothing worked at all on either website during peak hours but did work quite normally outside of these hours and it only apparently started happening after PN tweaked the Traffic Management.
What else would you have expected me to say or provide evidence of ? It seems to me that everything was pretty clear when I started this thread and it most certainly was the following day IMHO. The fact that another customer had already reported the problem and provided TCP/IP data captures via the ticket system some 24 hours before my second post on the subject but PN still weren't aware of the problem, still hadn't investigated the report and were obviously not making any effort whatsoever to fix it kinda says it all really. A blatantly obvious problem (admittedly only if you were 1 of the customers experiencing it, not all customers were) with a variety of hard evidence provided but basically being completely ignored until a few customers started getting annoyed. Customers should not be the Quality Control Department and nor should they be required to act as unpaid consultants diagnosing and providing detailed evidence of faults. If they can help identify issues and provide very useful information then fine but to expect customers to effectively find and fix problems themselves rather than PN investigating reports of something strange going on is quite wrong. I (and subsequently other customers) provided way more than enough evidence of a problem together with more than sufficient background information for someone at PN with ready access to customers A/C details to investigate. They didn't until other customers eventually backed me up and appeared to be similarly annoyed about it.
Historically, PN have almost always throttled Akamai data very severely and often to death. Given the sole purpose for websites various using Akamai services in the first place, it gets way beyond a joke when PN decide that they're simply going to severely throttle ALL Akamai data regardless of what the data is, which websites are using Akamai and what data transfer rate is actually required in order for the website to work satisfactorily.
As for the different data sources, the basic website data appears to come from 1 source, the various adverts before a programme starts playing come from 1 or more different sources and the programme itself from yet another source. As I suggested in my various posts, it was only the programme data itself that was being severely and totally unreasonably throttled. The website itself and the various adverts generally worked without major issues. I also quoted the specific data source that never worked properly due to the excessive throttling: 88.221.84.87:1935 [a88-221-84-87.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com] as well as providing times when this happened and graphs showing the data transfer rates clearly indicating excessive and unreasonable throttling. I also said that EVERY 4oD programme I tried watching was affected and EVERY ITV Player programme I tried watching was affected but BBC iPlayer programmes were NOT affected and neither was anything else. There was no gray area or an apparent intermittent problem ... nothing worked at all on either website during peak hours but did work quite normally outside of these hours and it only apparently started happening after PN tweaked the Traffic Management.
What else would you have expected me to say or provide evidence of ? It seems to me that everything was pretty clear when I started this thread and it most certainly was the following day IMHO. The fact that another customer had already reported the problem and provided TCP/IP data captures via the ticket system some 24 hours before my second post on the subject but PN still weren't aware of the problem, still hadn't investigated the report and were obviously not making any effort whatsoever to fix it kinda says it all really. A blatantly obvious problem (admittedly only if you were 1 of the customers experiencing it, not all customers were) with a variety of hard evidence provided but basically being completely ignored until a few customers started getting annoyed. Customers should not be the Quality Control Department and nor should they be required to act as unpaid consultants diagnosing and providing detailed evidence of faults. If they can help identify issues and provide very useful information then fine but to expect customers to effectively find and fix problems themselves rather than PN investigating reports of something strange going on is quite wrong. I (and subsequently other customers) provided way more than enough evidence of a problem together with more than sufficient background information for someone at PN with ready access to customers A/C details to investigate. They didn't until other customers eventually backed me up and appeared to be similarly annoyed about it.
Historically, PN have almost always throttled Akamai data very severely and often to death. Given the sole purpose for websites various using Akamai services in the first place, it gets way beyond a joke when PN decide that they're simply going to severely throttle ALL Akamai data regardless of what the data is, which websites are using Akamai and what data transfer rate is actually required in order for the website to work satisfactorily.
Quote from: dave Something very weird has happened with 4oD. The new signature we added for 4oD was for the iPad so shouldn't have made any difference on a PC. Looking what the traffic is being detected as looks like it's hitting a P2P signature, I can't though replicate the problem and looking at the traffic flows only a small percentage of 4oD is being incorrectly tagged. I suspect that something has changed with one of the sources 4oD use, they use a mix of Flash, HTTP and HTTPS. It's only some of the Flash that's showing up incorrectly. I've put a temporary change in to try and fix it. Let us know if it makes any difference (I can see the traffic being correctly tagged now).
As I mentioned in an earlier post, it looked to me that it was a problem with Akamai data on port 1935 (RTMP) being throttled to death. It also appeared to be exactly the same problem with both 4oD and ITV Player.
I've tried a couple of things on 4oD tonight and I can confirm that this type of data is now apparently being capped at ~4Mb/s rather than something quite ridiculously low as it was and therefore these streams are now playing without any problems. Whilst I obviously can't be 100% certain as I don't know exactly what you tweaked or exactly what services 4oD and ITV Player routinely use, whatever you tweaked yesterday does appear to have been successful so many thanks for that and hopefully the problem wont recur
