Broadband slowdown when streaming TV in the evenings.

whvkza

A couple of days ago I got a little streaming box that which you can find pictures of by searching for CS968.

I bought it from a company offering to stream local channels from the country that I'm originally from. They said that I would need 2-3 Megabits to use the service and told me how to do a speedtest where I was getting nearly 13 Megabits.

I'm not the best with setting up things like this but I setup up everything and during the days it works fine but after about 5pm the audio and video freeze a lot where the channels just become unwatchable. This has happened every evening since I received the box.

I did the same speedtest a number of times last night and the speed was fluctuating between 5 and 10 Megabits so I don't understand why it freezes. I thought the box was faulty but when I turned on and tried to load some webpages on my laptop the speed was very slow as well to the point where I couldn't even watch videos on youtube.

I thought that I had made a mistake so I got a neighbour to have a look and he said that setup-wise everything was fine.

Can anyone offer some help please?

JJ_Egan

If you mean the Android TV Box then try streaming local content from a legitimate UK source like the BBC .
Slow after 5pm suggests contention / to many users on the network .
Might also be the originating site that's the problem .

whvkza

Yes, it's an Android TV box but I can't seem to get into the Android operating system to try any apps. It seems to be locked down by the company.

I've been doing a little testing since I started the thread such as running a speedtest when the screen freezes but I still get the ~13 Megabits that I normally get (does this mean that my connection is fine and the problem is on their end?) and when the video is running I get about 2 Megabits less on the tests which I guess shows the bandwidth taken by the streaming.

If it is contention is there anything that I can do?

patman99

It could actually be your BB connection rather than your streaming box.

I'm with Plusnet and find my BB slows-down to a crawl some evenings making on-demand TV a nightmare.

I used to use Sky BB with no issues.

brewerdave

It could either be contention at your local exchange or back haul congestion.
Not much you can do,other than complain to your ISP in the hope that they will put pressure on BTOpenretch to sort the issues out.

LazyTyper

brewerdave wrote: »

It could either be contention at your local exchange or back haul congestion.
Not much you can do,other than complain to your ISP in the hope that they will put pressure on BTOpenretch to sort the issues out.

Exchange contention or back haul congestion are not issues which involve Openreach.

whvkza

I spoke to the company that provided me the TV box and they told me to use an ethernet cable rather than Wi-Fi to solve my issue.

I'm currently getting 4 out of 5 bars on the wireless signal indicator that comes up on screen so will making it a wired connection change anything?

brewerdave

LazyTyper wrote: »

Exchange contention or back haul congestion are not issues which involve Openreach.

......But they will install extra equipment if instructed by BT Wholesale/ISPs -at least that was my understanding???

JJ_Egan

whvkza wrote: »

I spoke to the company that provided me the TV box and they told me to use an ethernet cable rather than Wi-Fi to solve my issue.

I'm currently getting 4 out of 5 bars on the wireless signal indicator that comes up on screen so will making it a wired connection change anything?

My guess is that its the stream that is the problem .
Many of these streaming sites are not legitimate and suffer problems with decent streaming .