Upload and Download problems and Ping Spikes whilst Streaming

[IsabelleLear]

Hello!

I'm actually a student who has come back home to stay with their grandparents whilst on holiday and they are with BT.
Im a streamer in my free time and was doing so without problems before coming here.

My download is 50Mbps and 17 Upload MBps, but during my streams, both of these drop horrendously and my ping spikes to about 1000, causing my streams to be difficult to watch, and almost pointless to do.

I want to note that usually my stream is fine for about an hour or so until it spikes during the evening. (I start at 3pm it will start to spike at 5) It then stabilises for a little while, and it will happen again.
I can stream earlier around 12pm and its ok up until 4pm onwards, but I want to be able to stream much longer than this, as its basically my job.

Im using one of those BT disc Hubs with an ethernet cable as my PC doesn't have a wireless connection, I also used a powerline adapater but proved to be much worse and slower so I switched back to the disc

This only happens whilst Im streaming during the evening hours, 4pm onwards I have noticed the problems starting to occur, and when I am not streaming, my speeds and ping is fine, I stop streaming whilst my speeds are low, and it stabilises after a while and doesn't occur again if I'm not streaming.

BT contacted my grandparents saying they noticed a problem but and it's been fixed on their account, but it's still occurring wanted to make sure this was an actual problem on the network side, or maybe something else?

Thanks

[naylor2006]

With respect, as im not a streamer....if I was gaming and streaming at the same time I'd want quite a bit more than 17Mbps to handle that, streaming uploads right? If so if you are exhausting that upload a bit then the latency between you and your gaming server will severely suffer.

No surprise powerline didnt help they are dreadful for latency.

Those discs are I assume the Mesh disc (black) the WIFI is making a hop between the router wirelessly to the disc, this is already asking for trouble if you ask me. If you are only staying during the holidays and this is your job then get a huge ethernet cable and hook right into the router during streaming, that is of course that 17Mbps will do the job anyway, but yeah, get the cable, if its only temporary hopefully they wont mind.

[IsabelleLear]

Thank you for the advice!

I actually don't stream games, I stream art so it takes much less, which is why 17 should be fine! I've lowered my bitrate to see if that helps for now too, if not I'll ask about a longer cable worst case!!

[naylor2006]

That’s a very good idea.

If you are streaming art the same applies really, 17Mbps might be pushing it to stream in 1080p so yeah lowering the bitrate and/or res will help for sure.

I expect though the best results will be connected directly to the hub also.

[IsabelleLear]

Update!

Lowered my bitrate, switched to 720p 30 fps and the problems are still occurring.

I'm abit confused with our speeds here because my grandad has an email from BT saying our max upload is 6Mbps but a speed test online is around 17Mbps?

[naylor2006]

My favourite speed test is: Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test

Run a test there and post the screenshot?

In any case, you are still running over WIFI, try the loooooong cable.

[IsabelleLear]

Unfortunately I don't have a long cable right now and cant check that 😞

Here is what it says for now, my internet is currently pretty stabilised

But this is what it drops to when everything spikes:

[naylor2006]

Yeah 11ms ping, nice....good solid numbers.

At this point I would want to rule out WIFI and the many things that can effect it, run the ethernet when you need to stream.

[steephill]

Looking at the timing of your issue I would suspect simple congestion - you are hitting the evening rush hour and your shared connection can't keep up.

You say that streaming is your job so you need to check what your grandparents contract allows. Normal domestic contracts do not permit running a business. Working from home has made this a bit of a grey area but I suspect your streaming use might fall foul of the T&Cs.

[IsabelleLear]

I am not running the business from here - I am just working remotely, as most people are these days. Regardless, this is a new problem - it’s only started occurring recently. Previously the network could handle the load with no issue.