PC speed Test

[sophie]

Can anyone think why, with a Dowload Speed of 18.07mbs and Upload speed of 4.74mbs, I can still not get BBC iPlayer TV. I just get messages to say "unable to connect because bandwidth in insufficient" (or words to that effect)

[Bert]

Me too

[kbasat]

I can think of approx 20 reasons why, let me try to summarize to 3 most likely scenarios:

1. you connection out to the Internet is obviously good, but this does not mean that your home will be connected to every server on the Internet with same quality. What this means that you may pass through multiple servers, may traverse through multiple countries to get to the servers of BBC Iplayer. Any connection issue, possible saturation of any of those servers in the middle would act as a bottleneck and affect your connection quality between you and BBC Iplayer servers.

2. Even companies as rich as BBC Iplayer has finite resources. When you are budgeting servers for a service like BBC Iplayer, if is likely to be very costly to build a system for worst case scenario. So a compromise may need to be made. This means that you are more likely to get issues when you are trying to watch live television, when very popular shows are on, not because you have issues with your own connection, but because BBCs servers are saturated. When I search the net for Iplayer problems, I came accross people complaining IN the UK with their 100mbps connections that Iplayer buffers, which indicates that this is the most likely case.

3. A service as big as BBC iplayer cannot be served from a single server. There has to be a cluster of servers in the background that serves feeds to customers. From time to time, it is possible that some servers are more saturated than others, so if you end up being unlucky and connect to one of those servers, you may experience problems while some other people do not. In this case it is worth to stop and restart your stream (maybe close your browser and start again) and this may help with connecting to a better server.

You should realize that live streaming is the single most demanding job when it comes to internet, this usually translates to: "Do not expect a 100% perfect streaming as N.Cyprus is not very well connected to the outside world". As Multimax, we do our best to keep our side of the network up to spec, unfortunately, nothing much* we can do when it leaves out network.

* All Internet Service Providers in Cyprus has ONLY ONE option to get out to the Internet, which is TTnet (Turk Telekom). We have no option for a second provider. The difference in service quality comes from the quality of the Internal Network (Infrastructure), availability of bandwidth for demand (if an ISP has 500mbits of total band and demand is 700mbits, obviously there will be issues), and the quality of customer service and finally price...

Hope this explanation helps.

K.

[Bert]

I appreciate your expanation as I am sure everyone else does
Cheers

[ozankoys]

I always record BBC programmes then they play perfectly. With the new upgraded MMax speeds they seem to record in minutes!

[sophie]

Thanks for that Kemal, much appreciated. I'm not bothered one way or another about watching live TV and frequently watch iplayer for things that are yonks old, just before BBC pushes them "over the edge"!! Will plod on with what I've got, when I get it. When push comes to shove I listen to plays on Radio 4.