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I reject your reality and substitute my own. - Adam Savage
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#include <std_disclaimer>
Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.
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I reject your reality and substitute my own. - Adam Savage
Trusted Spark Subscriber
#include <std_disclaimer>
Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.
Subscriber
I reject your reality and substitute my own. - Adam Savage
Trusted Spark Subscriber
#include <std_disclaimer>
Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.
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I reject your reality and substitute my own. - Adam Savage
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I'm in rural Hastings. I have posted about my streaming frustrations in the past. Part of it is due to my own lack of knowledge. I sometimes have issues that I don't understand, and that gets frustrating. I can't always tell if I really have a problem, or what the cause might be.
My ISP (Netspeed) has told me in the past that they resell VF, and the mast that supplies my RBI signal is in Flaxmere. When it was first upgraded to 4G, I got good solid test download speeds, always around 30 Mbp/s. After doing some reading about LTE, I installed a second antenna (identical to the first) to see what would happen. At the time I experimented with every possible configuration and position that could be done on my roof (old farmhouse, steep iron roof, different levels). For some reason (that I again don't understand), LTE configuration did not give improvement. The best result was with the antennas stacked one above the other in vertical orientation. I hit 50+ Mbp/s on Ookla download tests.
After some time, during summer holidays, my speed plummeted to almost nothing, sometimes only a few hundred Kbp/s. I spent a lot of time with my ISP trying to fix this. I never really did. Eventually, after several months, it slowly came right on its own.
For quite awhile, high demand stuff like streaming has been fairly good, though test speeds have never returned to their former heights. But I don't really care what the tests say as long as the streams work. My average test speeds have been around 25-30 Mbps and that seems adequate for my purposes.
Lately I got into Kodi and around the same time, my test speeds started going down again. At the moment they seem to be averaging around 15-20 Mbp/s. With Kodi I have started having buffering issues again. Since my test speeds have also dropped, I am trying to figure out exactly what is going on. Sometimes Kodi (and other streaming sources) works fine. But often it goes to hell exactly when I want to watch something, which is really frustrating. Sometimes the buffering doesn't seem to make sense. I get lengthy pauses every half minute or so on a local source while distant ones are either okay or at least not as bad. It can be very confusing.
The buffering seems worse on Kodi and it has a reputation for that, but according to everything I read, my connection speeds should still be more than adequate, especially for lower resolution/bitrate content. But that doesn't always seem to be the case. I have learned from experience that I need test speeds of at least 10+ Mbp/s to get smooth streaming and sometimes even that is not enough. When my speeds drop to around 7 Mbp/s or so, which happens more and more, I can't stream anything. One thing I have noticed is that my speed seems to jump around a lot, even when it is good, and this causes real problems with adaptive streaming.
That is my story, more or less. Here is a graph of my DSL tests over time. Even where it gives me an 'A', I can't stream at the lower speeds.
I noticed last night that my signal strength indicator was lower than I have ever seen it, down to one bar. Usually it is two or three. Right now it is back to two.
I reject your reality and substitute my own. - Adam Savage
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Subscriber
I reject your reality and substitute my own. - Adam Savage
Subscriber
I reject your reality and substitute my own. - Adam Savage
Trusted Lifetime subscriber
Subscriber
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