Constant buffering/dropouts on Neon (iOS) app

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Handsomedan

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#250616 18-May-2019 17:29

I’ve been getting more than a little frustrated of late with buffering, dropping framerates and blank screens or stuttering with the Neon app.

It’s multiple devices so can’t just be my iPad and we are on full speed fibre, with unlimited data...

Seriously thinking about ditching all of my sky services, including Neon if they don’t address quality of service...its not like it’s free.

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Wash

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#2241239 20-May-2019 11:48

What ISP are you with? Have you been in touch with NEON support?

Dairyxox

1594 posts

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#2248323 30-May-2019 11:08

I had this problem too. I'd been in touch with Neon support and they're stumped after running trace routes, pings, speedtests etc.

iPad and iPhone, Airplay to Apple tvs 3 & 4 were all terrible.

Using google chrome on a laptop was better but I'd still have instances where the stream would stop or pause a few times an hour.

I'm currently with Orcon and using a Fritzbox 7490 with 100/20 fibre.

What I found was; when I disabled IPV6 in the Fritzbox all the buffering/pausing/stopping issues disappeared.

Maybe it was a coincidence and they fixed their CDN, but I think it was some weird combination of my router/orcon/neon/ipv6.

Its only a neon thing, all other streaming providers I've used worked fine with IPV6.

Now I only wish the stream would stick to HD. 99% of what I see on neon is SD, it might go up to HD for 1 minute, then drop back down for the remainder of the episode.

Does it work in HD all the time for anyone?

Handsomedan

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#2248370 30-May-2019 12:00

Wash:

What ISP are you with? Have you been in touch with NEON support?

I'm with Slingshot - I've got Neon doing all the usual investigations as mentioned above and they are so far also stumped as to what it could be...

Handsome Dan Has Spoken.
Handsome Dan needs to stop adding three dots to every sentence...

Handsome Dan does not currently have a side hustle as the mascot for Yale

*Gladly accepting donations...

fe31nz

1228 posts

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#2248793 30-May-2019 22:08

Dairyxox:

I had this problem too. I'd been in touch with Neon support and they're stumped after running trace routes, pings, speedtests etc.

iPad and iPhone, Airplay to Apple tvs 3 & 4 were all terrible.

Using google chrome on a laptop was better but I'd still have instances where the stream would stop or pause a few times an hour.

I'm currently with Orcon and using a Fritzbox 7490 with 100/20 fibre.

What I found was; when I disabled IPV6 in the Fritzbox all the buffering/pausing/stopping issues disappeared.

Maybe it was a coincidence and they fixed their CDN, but I think it was some weird combination of my router/orcon/neon/ipv6.

Its only a neon thing, all other streaming providers I've used worked fine with IPV6.

Now I only wish the stream would stick to HD. 99% of what I see on neon is SD, it might go up to HD for 1 minute, then drop back down for the remainder of the episode.

Does it work in HD all the time for anyone?

With IPv6 and an ISP that needs PPPoE for the connection, you have to make sure that the MTU settings are right. With a FritzBox on 2Degrees, it all just works as 2Degrees loads the correct settings via their TR069 control of the router. But with Orcon, they may not support the FritzBox and you may need to set it all up manually. If you get it wrong, you will lose all long IPv6 packets going either way through the PPPoE interface. The usual symptom that people see first is that Facebook's front page fails to load properly as Facebook is fully IPv6 and sends long packets. The settings you need are:

WAN Ethernet port MTU: 1508

VLAN 10 MTU: 1508

PPPoE MTU: 1500

What this does is to use the overprovisioning of the fibre connection that is available to support this, so the packets on the fibre are MTU 1508 with the extra 8 bytes of PPPoE overhead. That allows the PPPoE connection to be MTU 1500, which is the default maximum packet size for IPv4 and IPv6 on Ethernet. With the smaller packets that result if you have the MTU at 1500, the PPPoE MTU is 1492, and any IPv4 packets bigger than that will be fragmented into two smaller packets automatically. That slows down the IPv4 traffic a bit, but not so much that you would notice. But IPv6 does not allow fragmentation of packets. What is supposed to happen with an IPv6 packet that is too big for the PPPoE MTU of 1492 is that it is dropped and an ICMPv6 "Packet too big" packet is returned to the sender, to allow the sender to adjust its packet size. It is mandatory that all software that supports IPv6 does that. But all the PPPoE software I have met, including in the FritzBoxes, is broken - it does not send the necessary ICMPv6 packets. So you need to ensure that the largest IPv6 packets you send will fit through the PPPoE connection, either by making the PPPoE MTU large enough, or by telling IPv6 software that is sending packets out to the Internet to use a smaller MTU.