Forum Discussion

Kaiserfamily's avatar
Kaiserfamily
Sophomore
7 years ago

Unable to stream still

HughesNet has never been able to allow me to stream without major buffering. It takes 5 hours to watch a 2 hour movie. I am going through an amazon fire stick which uses WiFi not LAN. Any ideas?
  • MarkJFine's avatar
    MarkJFine
    7 years ago

    See, this is what I'm talking about. Sounds to me like that's not a simple 683mb movie. In fact if it were, you should have no problem streaming even in FAP.

     


    @@Kaiserfamily wrote:
    Yes congestion maybe a factor but when you are paying so much for so little shouldn’t that be factored in with service? Comcast and AT&T doesn’t suffer from this.

    What you're paying for is the sunk cost, technology, real estate, and overhead required to bring a 2-way satellite signal to your house. The costs are mind boggling. You really can't compare it to the cost involved in terrestrial (Comcast and AT&T) which is nothing more than a server and some cabling (or fiber) from 3-5 miles away, and not a whole lot of overhead at all - we're talking pennies on the dollar.

     

    Next, consider that satellite has a finite amount of end-user spot beams (~97 are used), with a finite amount of bandwidth per spot beam. You're sharing that beam with others over an area covering a few hundred miles in either direction, not just a handful of expandable servers for a single neighborhood.

     

    Each spot beam, is then merged with signals from other spot beams, and channelled through one of about 17 ground stations matrixed about the west coast, which are then connected to an upstream provider on the internet.

     

    The key here is 'finite' because you can't just call a tech, fly up to the satellite and add a new beam like you can with a terrestrial service.

     

    So what you do, whatever others are doing on your router, the same beam you're on, and even the ground station you share adversely affects the congestion that you see. I think we did the math on here once and came to the conclusion that the resource demands created by only 40 people on the same beam simultaneously watching an HD movie could feasibly shut the whole beam down.

     

    I'm not even including the impact that 500ms latency (satellite: ~72k miles vs. terrestrial 3-5 miles) has on trying to do resource intense activities such as streaming.

     

    You're right, Comcast and AT&T don't suffer from this, but they're not even close to being the same thing.

  • BirdDog's avatar
    BirdDog
    Assistant Professor

    First question has to be how close is the Fire Stick to the Hughes modem? Streaming over Wifi is going to need a strong signal.

  • Hi Kaiserfamily,

     

    Thank you for reaching out to us! I am sorry to hear that, I would be frustrated too if it took that long to watch a movie. I am glad to further investigate this for you. I made some changes to the account to improve your streaming. Go ahead and test watching a movie on your fire stick. If you have further questions please do not hesitate to ask!  

     

    • Kaiserfamily's avatar
      Kaiserfamily
      Sophomore
      Still have buffering issues. Movie I am trying to watch now has been stuck for 20 min.
      • maratsade's avatar
        maratsade
        Distinguished Professor IV

        Have you followed all the steps that Hardy suggested? 

  • GabeU's avatar
    GabeU
    Distinguished Professor IV

    Kaiserfamily

     

    I don't know if streaming with the FireStick triggers the Video Data Saver to kick in, but just in case, it may be beneficial to turn off, or pause (Snooze), the Video Data Saver if you're streaming in HD.  If the VDS does kick in, doing so should help with the buffering.  

     

    What is Video Data Saver?  

    • Kaiserfamily's avatar
      Kaiserfamily
      Sophomore

      I wasn't sure if I needed to buy a Wifi booster to make streaming work.

      • Hardy's avatar
        Hardy
        Moderator

        Hi Kaiserfamily,

         

        As Gabe has mentioned, the video data saver might not be communicating well with the fire stick. I would recommend snoozing the video data saver to see if that improves the buffering. You can locate this under My Account>Settings. I would also make sure to go through and change the resolution settings to standard definition or to medium this way you do not use as much data. As for now I would not worry about a Wi-Fi booster being that you are so close to the modem. Again, if you have any further questions, drop them here! Thanks!

         

        *Felicia*