international speeds

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kaczor47

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#132267 15-Oct-2013 13:17

[I hesitated if I should post this in the 'new plans' thread... mods, feel free to move this accordingly.]

Recently I was upgraded to 130 mbps. Excited by this, I signed up for NHL Gamecenter Live streaming service. The last few nights I got increasingly frustrated, however, by the inability to stream even a 1600 kpbs feed reliably. A few speedtests to North American servers gave download rates in the range of 2-3 mbps (I tried a lot of servers).

Now, I don't expect anywhere around 100 mbps to overseas servers, but to sell a 130 mbps service where international rates can't reliably exceed 3 mbps is, in my opinion, ridiculous.

I wonder if with all these new plans and upgrades Vodafone is going to increase their international capacity?

sidefx

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#915422 15-Oct-2013 13:42

Live streaming NHL seems like a bit of a niche market in NZ. Selling that service (130mbps connections) probably makes perfect sense for many (the majority?) of average consumers who just want to stream content hosted locally or in Australia. I doubt this issue has much to do with Vodafones international bandwidth, of which I'm sure they have plenty.

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kaczor47

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#915430 15-Oct-2013 13:49

True, it may be a niche application, however the (IMO slow) speedtest results are unrelated to this. I was mainly commenting on the speedtests, the NHL comment was just there for the storyline :). I do realise that I likely don't have the benefit of content caching when watching hockey.

[Reply to the Robots: of course I reset the router, modem etc etc.]

Jas777

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#915432 15-Oct-2013 13:54

kaczor47,

I once had MLBtv and used to get the same issues. I don't think it is related to vodafone so much as to what NHLtv is designed for.

NHLTV, MLBtv, NBAtv etc are designed for the mobile, tablet etc market in the US and as such don't lend themselves well to the high quality picture market.

The other issue you get is US usage so it may pay to watch when people in the US are asleep.

Inphinity

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#915462 15-Oct-2013 14:45

I've had similar issues for several months. Within NZ/Aus is great. Beyond that is erratic at best. Unfortunately, it seems not much can be done.

timmmay

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#915504 15-Oct-2013 16:15

Can you do a speed test to a few US servers? It may be that a single connection doesn't have the bandwidth due to TCP latency, or that company might not have the right international links.

amanzi

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#915612 15-Oct-2013 17:39

timmmay: Can you do a speed test to a few US servers? It may be that a single connection doesn't have the bandwidth due to TCP latency, or that company might not have the right international links.

There's been some discussions on here about speeds to Aussie and they seem to be affected the most by the routing paths that are taken to the destination. I believe the same is true with other international locations too. For example, I typically get less than 10Mbps on speedtests to the West Coast of the US, often as low as 3 or 4Mbps. But right now, I can get 42/10Mbps to a location in San Jose, but just next door in Palo Alto only gets me 5/2Mbps.

So I don't know if this is Vodafone's routing to certain destinations, or if those destinations just have shirty bandwidth providers...

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amanzi

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#915675 15-Oct-2013 19:33

Actually, I'm not sure if those speed tests to San Jose are accurate. I've never seen speeds that high to the US before, and if I go to Softlayer's own speed test it comes back with a more predictable result:

I wonder if there's some strange caching going on with the speedtest.net version?