iPlayer problems

[Sean]

Anybody else use BBC's iPlayer and having problems?

I am on the Karoo Max Option Two package and for the last two days iPlayer will not work, buffers a few seconds worth then buffers again.  (I am trying to watch streaming video).

My speedtest results are "normal", as in the 1-2mbps I expect at this time of the evening.  I have no problems with 4 or Sky.

Traceroute to the servers are fine.  I am wondering if Karoo are making my experience as bad as possible to make me "up"grade!

[willcocks]

probably to be fair, and emphasis on the "up" was well placed.

though my iplayer is working on karoo pro. usenet is 20k/s though :|

[Sean]

It's not a speed issue, I am experiencing a lot of packet loss on the streams.

Not sure if this is BBC's (or their partner's) fault, or Karoos, although a continual ping results in no loss.

About 1 in 7 packets coming back from the Akamai server is missing, this is retransmitted but in the meantime the stream has to pause.

[chrisbyrd]

Sean

Try installing the demo of PingPlotter - it might give an idea whereabouts the packet loss is ocurring

[willcocks]

another tool is winMTR. that can be useful in plotting packetloss

http://winmtr.sourceforge.net/

must stress though that when I was on max option 2 often the bandwidth wasn't high enough to run iplayer.

[Sean]

I can ping -t 92.122.210.166 for hours, and not lose a single packet.

This is the Akamai Edge server that is serving me the streams.  Akamai servers are very close to most IPs, i.e.:

Code:

C:\Users\Sean>tracert -d 92.122.210.166

Tracing route to 92.122.210.166 over a maximum of 30 hops

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2     8 ms     8 ms     7 ms  83.100.196.254
  3     8 ms     7 ms     8 ms  10.102.240.65
  4     8 ms     8 ms     8 ms  10.102.240.213
  5    14 ms    13 ms    14 ms  10.102.57.7
  6    14 ms    14 ms    14 ms  195.66.224.168
  7    14 ms    13 ms    14 ms  92.122.210.166

Trace complete.

If I run WireShark and look at the TCP stream, TCP packets from the server containing the streaming video and audio go missing, about 1 in every 7.  They are retransmitted as per the norm for TCP, but while the server waits to see the packet was lost, and then I wait to receive it, there is that inevitable 4 or 5 second pause.

I picked a stream at random while writing this message, it took 5 minutes to write this message, and only 2 minutes of the stream has completed.