buffering

[#1]

I have an download speed of 78.9 mb/s and a upload speed of 17.12 mb/s on PS unlimited.

It is impossible to watch a movie on Amazon Prime without constant buffering. BBC i player has the same issues.

As my Prime membership is coming to an end shortly I am wondering if Netflix will be better or if it is a PN problem.

I used to live in a really rural area with a download speed of less than 20 mbs (on BT) and never had an issue. Now I'm in the middle of a town with the high speed broadband and it awful. Any suggestions please? 

[#2]

Which router are you using ? I'm not having any issues on prime and am watching c4 catch up with no buffering

[#3]

The PN router sent to me.

[#4]

do you know if it's a hub one or hub zero?

[#5]

I run a hub 1, and watch 4K amazon and Netflix via smart TV, no problem with sky q 4K or sky on demand.

When you get buffering does the whole internet stop for a while or does it just impact video?

Be interesting if you could have a ping going, i.e. In windows
Ping -t pingbox1.thinkbroadband.couk

Then when you get buffering see if the ping is spiking or timing out.

How do you connect too, over wifi powerline or Ethernet?

[#6]

hub one

[#7]

when the dreaded buffering symbol is shown the only course is to totally shut down Prime and start again. Its as if the picture is just frozen. I have in the past waited for the buffering to stop, but it never does.

I have then gone to the computer for help topics on the subject and the computer accesses the internet properly. The speed tests I have done when buffering show figures similar to the those I posted at the start of this thread.

I should add that the Prime movies are always HD.

I suspect its Amazon Prime that is the problem, but I don't want to sign up with another provider if the problems are with cabling or hardware.

I have used wireless and wired. Same result.

[#8]

Just testing your broadband, and I'm not seeing any issues:

Sync Status	In Sync
Downstream Speed	78.0 Mbps
Upstream Speed	20.0 Mbps

Profile Name

0.128M-80M Downstream, Retransmission Low - 0.128M-20M Upstream, Error Protection Off

Your connection is also pretty stable:

Do you only experience the buffering when using Amazon Prime?

[#9]

The issue now makes watching a film on Prime impossible. It has also happened on BBC I player.

[#10]

If you go to (via google) btw Speedtest what speed is it coming back with?is the 78.9 in your first post from a Speedtest or the speed your router reports as the line sync?
I have a fault where my line sync is correct at 78 but I'm going 10meg at peak time, probably different issue toy you as iPlayer and prime works fine still.

IPlayer doesn't reall stop with low bandwidth it will generally drop to its sd version at 2meg/sec

Did you try my suggestion above about running a ping from a pc at same time?

What does iplayer do from a pc also or is it just tv player problem?

[#11]

the speed test was from a third party speed test website.

As for the ping test, I did manage to send and receive the same amount of data and nothing was lost.

I suspect that PN is slowing the speed at peak times, which is not what I pay for.

Never had any issues watching I player from a computer.

[#12]

---

@pring4177 wrote:

I suspect that PN is slowing the speed at peak times, which is not what I pay for.

---

Doubt it to be honest, accourings to their traffic prioritisation link 

https://www.plus.net/help/broadband/about-traffic-prioritisation/

They only prioritise traffic "In exceptional circumstances the network could become much busier than expected. This could be due to a major news event leading to a huge amount of online traffic, or in the rare case of network failure, for example. In these situations, we would prioritise traffic on our network to help ensure you get a great service no matter how busy it is."

If they constantly de-prioritised video traffic everyone would be suffering the same problems.

WHen you get the buffering problems it would be good to do the speedtest at http://speedtest.btwholesale.com/ and then do the further diagnostic too, and paste the results, that shows both the speed and profile assigned by BTW to your line, in case its too small for some reason.

If you arent losing any traffic from the pings then doesnt look like you are having any packetloss issues.

So also sounds like from the PC its always fine as you never have any issues watching there, just via TV? If via TV which one do you use or is it via a set top box of plugin stick like a fire stick etc?

[#13]

I've been seeing this lately trying to stream from the More4 app. Random blips & freezes. Seems to be during peak hours. Surprised as More4 only streams SD & I have 75/18 fibre.

Around Christmas I couldn't get 4k anymore from Amazon, only upto 1080p. Support suggested removing my static IP & that seemed to get my 4k back apart from a few blips here & there (TV is worse than Fire TV box)

I'might not sure what to think really. My streaming reliability used to be much better with only the very occasional drop.

[#14]

If you are off your static ip now will be interesting if you still get the issues, static ips put you on plusnets bng (according to earlier plusnet staff posts), so now you are on a different bit of the network it may well be resolved.

If not then there may be a line fault causing loss of traffic possibly.