Streaming Through Wow vs Brighthouse

[wsamon]

Originally Posted by Tim Tim Tim

little inaccurate about their speeds. they do offer a 600mbps plan which is faster than the current 300mbps from bright house, but lets be honest here, very few people even need 300.

WSamon, I do see your concern with the number of hops being higher although none of that is going to cause your streaming to be poor. When you are having issues, I would try switching to hardwired to rule out any wireless congestion. Also, you are using the 5G network on your router, right?

If it still has issues hardwired, a tracerts should show which link is having the issues.

I'd like higher, but honestly, 60 and consistent would be fine.

My tech guy, assuming I understood him correctly, said the amount of jumping around can cause packets to come in out of order which causes problems for anything streaming.

It's not really "when I'm having issues" it's just pretty much always mediocre. 2 out of every 3 Zoom or Skype calls I have the video will pause or the audio will cut for a second here and there sometimes complaining about network issues, sometimes not. Occasionally it will even drop the call. Streaming through the Amazon Prime or Hulu apps on the TV often needs to buffer for a while if it's going to play smoothly in HD - Amazon often drops down to SD to keep the video smoother. I have similar, though lesser, problems through my phone, as does my wife when Facetiming through her iPHone (so she just uses the 4G all the time now).

I will try to hold my next couple meetings while hardwired to see if I notice a difference. Strangely, I don't think I have any more scheduled for today...

Unfortunately, my laptop doesn't seem capable of connecting to 5 ghz networks. My 5 ghz one doesn't even show up, only the 2.4 one, and I even tried adding it manually but it still wouldn't even try. The connection to my 2 ghz is at full bars everywhere in my house that I use the computer, and the TV is a whopping 15 feet from the router with direct line of site.

Originally Posted by DUNNDFRNT

Couldn't you have overlap? Don't disconnect Brighouse until you get out wow, I realize they are both coax not sure how that would work, since i have fiber I stopped paying attention to moca based technologies I had no idea they can get that v high 600mps on coax, I'd it squared what's the upload.

I'm curious about this myself, though I don't relish the thought of a $150+ internet bill for a month or two while I try it out. I wish I could get fiber, but FiOS isn't in our neighborhood and it'll probably be several years before Google Fiber is available.

Originally Posted by smarino

I run the cheapo Brighthouse Road Runner Lite, and have for years. No problens w/ streaming (may have to let it buffer a bit in the beginning on some movies, that's all), and just installed Skype the other day. The sound quality is just fine, no echo, no static. It sounds almost as good as a land line (although nothing is going to sound as good as an old AT&T phone with analog technology). Also, a router can slow things way down if it's not a good one.

I'll bet you're running things wireless. That is a crap way to do it. I always go w/ hard wired connections, and even on my low cost setup it works beautifully. You don't want a computer that is dragging things down either, so I got rid of that memory hog Firefox (Chrome was even worse) and run an old Pale Moon browser w/ Ad Block and a few other things. My anti virus was slowing things down as well, so it was jettisoned. Simply backing up regularly is all I need.

I need live streaming video (not just audio) with about 6 incoming feeds and no hiccups or buffering several times a day for work meetings.

While wired is way better, wireless is effectively the only option in my house. We're not going to run cables across open tile floors or all along walls and ceilings when there should be no necessity of doing so. If that's the only option then I may figure out a way to make it work for my office, but as I mentioned at the start, I was told by our IT guy (who is actually quite good - I realize many are not but this guy is) that it was actually just a crappy ISP and there wasn't much of anything that could be done about it.

[Tim Tim Tim]

if your wireless on 2.4ghz, im quite sure your issue lies there. If going hardwired to the router fixes the issue, you can either continue to do that or purchase a 5ghz capable WiFi adapter (USB may be easiest) and connect to the 5ghz network which will help dramatically.

[wsamon]

Originally Posted by Tim Tim Tim

if your wireless on 2.4ghz, im quite sure your issue lies there. If going hardwired to the router fixes the issue, you can either continue to do that or purchase a 5ghz capable WiFi adapter (USB may be easiest) and connect to the 5ghz network which will help dramatically.

I got my company to pay for a 5 ghz USB adapter so hopefully that works better. The overall download speed on 5 ghz seems to be worse when measured on fast.com and speedtest.com but hopefully the connection is more stable. I haven't had any issues during the 4 conference calls so far today, so fingers crossed.

I'd still like opinions on how Wow's network consistency compares to Brighthouse. If I can get similar (or hopefully better!) results I'd like to try it since it's a lot cheaper.