Do you ever experience connection problems when streaming a film?

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Marc

@Ciaran , Netflix sponsors a connectivity URL, fast.com, that specific to loads to and from Netflix servers that you can reference to verify what you're getting to the site.  That and Fing can make contribute to a potent troubleshooting arsenal.  

[Deleted User]

 @Ciaran I can’t comment on the specific issues with Virgin ISP but there are a number of very short duration outages ( < 1minute) on the main “data spines” affecting all service providers in the U.K. These occurrences are quite obvious, streaming services are interrupted and websites become temporarily inaccessible fortunately the outages are brief and a minor inconvenience. Fing is good at identifying this type of issue as Fingbox (& App) data can be aggregated to confirm an outage and the approximate geographic area affected.

Incidentally, what is far more difficult to identify is when Wi-fi behaves erratically but by careful tailoring of event monitoring, in Fingbox settings, problem devices can be readily identified if they go offline. However, very short duration LAN connection loss (a few milli-seconds) can be extremely frustrating for the user and harder to find without an analysis tool such as wireshark. This may be an area for further development in Fing.

Messy

The main problem with Virgin cable is that everyone has large bandwidth (100 - 300Mb) into their local virgin franchise. Mine is based on the outskirts of London whereas I am 15 miles away in the rural area.

The franchise provides access to Virgin services and a gateway (pair) out to the real Internet. Frequently requested data is cached within the franchise.

The main issue is that everyone has to compete with other people for some of the gateway bandwidth. I have seen my speed test results fall from close to 200Mb to just 5Mb at school tipping out times.

This contention commonly expresses itself as failed DNS requests through the gateway or even the cable modem failing to get a DHCP address. Note that the cable link remains up, so you cannot say your broadband is down.

I have further noticed that services such as Amazon prime, Netflix, Sony network and the like seem to be throttled. When Amazon (Love Film) used to display the bandwidth it was able to use, bandwidth would collapse at the end of school day but a speed test would show high bandwidth available .

This is most apparent if you have Netflix on the virgin box playing alongside Netflix playing over your broadband.

Each virgin franchise is responsible for the hardware and software within its area and obviously bears the cost of supporting and upgrading. My local franchise seems to be very slow in upgrading infrastructure.

I have a backup ADSL feed and a load balancer. The logs show that the ADSL is the live feed several times a day because the cable feed has failed. So often that I am considering an alternative to the virgin cable broadband.

I hope this helps understand the issue of using virgin cable.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

misswit95

Netflix "downtimes" do happen, I fact, I was told that in the Philippines, Netflix itself is asking users to slightly limit their usage. 

Marc

Some good news, Netflix is opening bandwidth back up...  https://www.neowin.net/news/netflix-starts-restoring-streaming-quality-in-parts-of-europe