Date: August 23, 2014
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Updates: I found out what went wrong with my Home Network. The culprit as I suspected is the Sineoji 600Mbps AV2 Homeplug. Some how it drop the speed between two points from 200Mbps down to this pathetic 15.47Mbps. Simply resetting it, it regain back to 70Mbps download speed. I will put the result of troubleshooting at the other blog.
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Today we are going to test to play the TV Streaming when the network download speed is low.
I simply wanted to prove one simple concept.
Network Setup
Don’t know why and how? My network at home has “degraded”. In my study room, I have a TV connected to my Minix NEO X7 box. I am using ViewQwest 200Mbps broadband. But don’t know start from when, it has degraded to below.
Although I am using 200Mbps. I can get near full speed near my router. But because I have to bring the Internet into the Network cabling using Homeplug, so, I have to suffer of losing almost 60% of the bandwidth due to power noise from Kitchen to Network cabinet. And then, from there, it runs thru my CAT6 cable to my study room.
Previously, may be 1-2 years ago, when I did the text, I can get close to about 90Mbps for both upload and download speed.
Today, I did the speed test again….
Speed Test
What? my download speed is only 15.47Mbps????? Why? The upload speed is 76.44Mbps. I do not know what happen, but for the past few months, I have not experience the slowness in watching streaming TV.
I watch a lot of TV and Movies streaming from PPTV or Netflix or others.
This is the first time I did a speedtest in a year or so. I speed test the network to ViewQwest speedtest server.
I will figure out later what happen to my network, where is the bottleneck and how to fix it. But now, let’s try to view some direct TV streaming from it and run PPTV streaming on it. See what is the performance like.
Yesterday, I watch 4 episodes of GTO (Japanese TV series) and 2 episodes of Hero (Japanese TV series) on PPTV on my Network. Without any buffering.
This is the speed test done on my iMac. As you can see, the download speed quite sucks!
Direct TV Streaming
Take note, I have been watching TV for the past few months. Didn’t know the download speed has degraded so much. May be is the USB fan? Or may be my Sineoji has degraded. I will find out later.
This is my Minix NEO X7 box. Running Cloud TV with a subscriptions that I can view Direct TV programs such as HBO, National Geographics, Fox, etc and so on.
So, as you can see, when you change the channel, the load up is very fast. Almost near to >1000KB/s.
So, with download speed of 15.47Mbps, I am able to watch HD tv streaming without any problem.
Test With PPTV Running on Slow Download Speed Network
I am testing it on my Minix Neo X7 box. So, I run the speed test before I test the PPTV App.
And then, I will run the Speed Test again after I run the PPTV app. So to show that the result of the slow download speed.
And what its he verdict? No problem for me to run the PPTV.
And PPTV is like almost instantly running. And there is no lagging and no buffering in the middle.
The first speed test result is 16.23Mbps download, 57.52Mbps upload.
Launching any TV show on PPTV take less than 1 second to load. And fast forwarding the TV is also takes 1 second to reload to that fast forwarded point.
When playing, seldom you see buffering.
The spinning indicator always shows very high value, such as 1066kB/s.
That is what I consider as FAST.
Now, let’s do another speed test.
This time, 15.95 download speed, and 54.60 upload speed.
Conclusions
1. I recently log onto hardware zone forum, and I see a lot of people felt very excited and post their speed test of 300Mbps, 500Mbps, and 800Mbps and so on. But what does that mean? Does it mean that having a low <16Mbps network will not run the PPTV well? Apparently, that is not the case. I have no idea when my network started to give <16Mbps download speed. It used to have 90Mbps. But after 1-2 years, my network has been running without any rebooting of any of my routers or homeplug. I still watching IPTV streaming every day and I did not notice the slowness.
2. A typical PPTV streaming needs a constant 2Mbps to stream. A Netflix needs 6Mbps to stream. So, having 16Mbps download speed and 100Mbpos or 600Mbps will not have any significant differences. As long as your ISP do not throttle your network, and your network is stable at 16Mbps, you still can do a very decent TV streaming.
OK. Now, I need to go and trouble shoot what is wrong with my In-house Internet infrastructure. Why suddenly drop to <16Mbps download speed.
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