Lots of streaming dropouts last few days - Remote administration

[#1]

Hi All,

For the last few days we've had a lot of problems when streaming content. Watching iplayer, all4 etc starts OK then pauses and lots of buffering. Typically a player will pause then we press play agin and it resumes; similar symptoms accross multiple devices and players.

I just had a look at the log on our router and I have a lot of entries like this (just three examples but there are many):

IN: BLOCK [16] Remote administration (TCP [103.157.168.52]:58366-​>[194.75.222.66]:80 on ppp3)

IN: BLOCK [16] Remote administration (TCP [14.244.33.234]:58985-​>[194.75.222.66]:22 on ppp3)

IN: BLOCK [16] Remote administration (TCP [141.98.80.69]:45033-​>[194.75.222.66]:22 on ppp3)

Using a IP address lookup I can see that the common 194.75.222.66 is Plusnet and the other IP addresses seem to come from all around the world. 

Google tells me that these entries seem to relate to remote attack on my router; is that correct and that it's likely to be the root cause of my dropout problem?

Interestingly yesterday we had a call from a hard to hear line from someone with an Indian accent that was purpotedly from OpenReach saying "we see you are having problems with your broadband". We assumed it was a scam and hung up but now I wonder if it was either quite a clever scam linked to this attack or maybe it was genuine (though I doubt it!)

Anything I can do to prevent it or minimise the impact of the problem or any advice?

Thanks for any advice.

Steve

[#2]

Hi,

I am having the same problem.Everything was fine until a week ago when I can no longer stream TV programs.This also happens when I use my Oculus Quest VR headset.Every now and then,a note appears in the head set saying that the head set is not connected to the internet.Can anyone help?

DKW.

[#3]

@stevenparham 

The "call from Openreach" is a scam, the gentleman who called you knows the person from Microsoft who calls me from time to time.....

I also wouldn't pay much notice to the logs.

On a more serious note, when the problem occurs try some speed tests and see if your measured speed (using Speedtest.net or Thinkbroadband) is lower than normal.

It is also sometimes possible to set streaming to a lower resolution (although generally streaming services are good at adapting their data rate to your connection).

Can you stream using a cabled device rather than on WiFi ? The issue may well be WiFi congestion.

Another thing I had trouble with in the past was OneDrive hogging all the upstream bandwidth and making the Internet unusable.

One other thing I might try (if it is easy to do on the streaming device) would be to change the DNS servers used to (say) the Google or OpenDNS servers.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using