Unplayable lag when netflix is running

[Keith_Beddoe]

Try this Google search "netflix causing high latency" -  reports from customers worldwide.

[Reaps]

So, since it's OK for some other providers to have the problems, it's fine for BT to have them too?

Terrible response.

[Keith_Beddoe]

There is nothing special about the BT network compared with other providers, they all make very little money from providing residential broadband, its Value Added Services (TV) that make the money, and latency does not affect those, unless the delay is large enough to significantly affect thoughput.

BT abandoned its own dedicated gaming platform some years ago now. I cannot remember what it was called.

Its VOIP (Voice Over IP) services which are affected mostly by high latency, however dedicated VOIP paths, as used by Fibre Voice, have end-to-end QOS controls which ensure that they get priority over other traffic.

I cannot really suggest any easy way forward.

[Reaps]

Not enough money in residential broadband? Many ISPs out there who don't offer IPTV traffic. Plenty of money in it. Perhaps not enough for BT (greedy) - so they chuck on additional services to try to top up their profit margins. In doing so, they cause network congestion issues which they don't care to resolve.

Don't they sound like a great ISP 🙂

[PaddyB]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for all the comments and please accept my sincere apologies for the problems some of you are having with online gaming.  As an online gamer myself I can appreciate how frustrating this can be.

From the comments that have been posted in the last few months we understand that some of you are reporting an increase in latency, on your connection when streaming content from Netflix and other streaming services.  This then has a knock on effect on your gaming experience.

I have reported a case to our network team to make sure that BT has not implemented any changes on the network side of things that may have an impact.  Today I have received an update that both the core and access network has been checked and there is nothing here that would explain the problems being reported on this thread.  As Keith has mentioned, reports of this nature appear all over the internet across a multitude of ISP’s both in the UK and worldwide so it doesn’t seem specific to any one provider or location.

I appreciate my comments will come as a disappointment because I cannot share any info that may help, however I just wanted to let you all know that your comments have not gone unnoticed, and if there was anything we could do to improve the situation we would have.

If you haven’t already tried, setting up port forwarding may help improve the situation.  If you are using a BT supplied hub then the instructions on how to do this can be found from this help article, Setting up port forwarding on a Home hub

Thanks

PaddyB

[Reaps]

Unfortunately, this is something I was hoping I wouldnt see.

A moderator getting involved and saying 'everything is fine' - when in fact - it's not.

As mentioned by Keith, since you don't monitor all aspects of your network, how could you 'check' something without having the tools to monitor it properly, my issues are at night, 8PM onwards, I'm sure you've checked that though?

I understand where your coming from though, as an IT Professional myself, I know these things can appear to look normal to the untrained eye, but usually with some proper analysis - you'll see why this is occurring, congestion/buffer bloat/prioritization. Sadly, you've got a network where you bind everyone to the same contract, where the needs differ between each home.

This is simply because BT as an ISP are too large to work on individuals problems long enough to understand what's really going on - low capacity at the BT Wholesale end. These aren't issues at the DSLAM, nore are they issues with the home configuration, it's purely down to BT as an ISP not performing as it should.

What's port forwarding got to do with any of this? Geez.

[Keith_Beddoe]

As a final note, which may help, and which I am sure I have suggested before, but cannot be done on a home hub unless you have all devices connected via a managed Ethernet switch.

Identify the device that is streaming Netflix and restrict its download bandwidth to 1.5Mbs (Netflix recommended minimum speed)  and its upload bandwidth to 300Kbs. Ensure that its given the lowest possible priority on your network.

See if that helps. If that fixes the problem, then you can try increasing the Netflix download speed a little bit at a time. Netflix recommend 3.0Mbs for DVD quality.

Apply the same limits to any other video streaming device, apart from BT YouView.

Ensure that the gaming console/computer  is connected using a direct Ethernet cable, to eliminate any latency caused by a  wireless connection. If you are using a computer for gaming, make sure there is no other program running which is using the network, like Cloud services, email, or Windows updates.

These are just suggestions that should mitigate some of the buffering taking place on the BT network, and would be the way that I would approach the problem if I had latency issues.

[Jakeyb21]

It definitely makes it even worse when a mod comes on and says they've checked and kind find nothing, it's worse because there's stuff going on in the network and they don't even know about it. Not good.

[Jakeyb21]

I guess you can't fix something that you don't even know is going on and also don't even know what's causing it. :(.

[Tmillo]

I genuinely believe Netflix has started uploading more while streaming, it makes no sense for us all to be getting the same when previously it was fine.

Either the whole country wide BT network has **bleep** a brick since January ish or something is causing Netflix to use more data.

BT could help a lot by allowing us to put our router in modem mode, having a solid QOS or even a specific game mod setting. Unfortunately they have nothing and so were screwed