For a little while now I've suspected that iPlayer traffic hasn't been picked up correctly by the VMBU internet activities breakdown, but now I feel I have as about conclusive evidence as I'm ever likely to obtain. According to the VMBU, I've currently used about 800MB of paid usage so far this billing month, which for me started on the 1st, with 472 of those MB being today. That sounds about right, as I spent an hour and a half watching 'high-quality' streams on iPlayer this afternoon. However, if I go to 'view internet activities', I find that paid-for streaming usage apparently accounts for only 5% of my total broadband usage this month. My grand total usage is 1678MB, of which 5% is 84MB - even if that '5%' figure has been rounded down from 5.99999%, we're still only looking at 100MB. This is clearly wrong for 1.5h of high-quality iPlayer streaming - I would expect to see a figure of somewhere between 3-400MB. And for what it's worth, all iPlayer streaming was done over two hours ago.
So it's clear that 'view my internet activities' is having problems identifying iPlayer traffic. However, I wonder if there could be a wider issue of traffic management too. I wonder about this because there have been occasions recently (albeit not today) when I've been watching iPlayer streams and they've paused midway several times, presumably to buffer. This shouldn't be happening as even the high-quality streams are designed for a 1Mbps line, and I have a 3-3.5Mbps connection. I originally conceded that this could have simply been a BBC issue, but having now seen that VMBU is mis-identifying traffic, I find myself wondering if there's a larger issue here instead.
