Unable to stream still

[Kaiserfamily]

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?

[BirdDog]

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.

[Kaiserfamily]

The fire stick is less than a foot away from the router.

[Hardy]

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]

Still have buffering issues. Movie I am trying to watch now has been stuck for 20 min.

[maratsade]

Have you followed all the steps that Hardy suggested? 

[Kaiserfamily]

Yes. I turned off data saver and it unfroze but still getting buffering every 5 to 10 minutes.

[MarkJFine]

What's the data rate of the video? Is it HD, SD, or (hopefully) less?

Also, are you within your data allowance, or are you in FAP mode?

[Kaiserfamily]

SD and running a token because HughesNet doesn’t have a plan that fits my needs.

[Kaiserfamily]

What a waste of a token. Started movie 2 hours 20 min ago and just now at 50 min mark.

[Hardy]

Kaiserfamily, 

Here are some tips on how to Manage Data. If you have any further questions please ask!

Thanks!

[Kaiserfamily]

I would need roughly 300+ as a minimum. Can’t manage 300 out of 50.

[GabeU]

@Kaiserfamily

A possible cause of the issue, especially in the evenings, is congestion.  Unfortunately, streaming can be touchy, and while your speed may appear to be adequate when tested, the quality of your bandwidth, due to the aforementioned congestion, may be of such that it's not conducive to steady streaming, even in SD, at a given time.  Again, though, it's more prevalent in the evenings because that's when most people are online.  

Further, and further on the unfortunate side, if the problem is due to congestion, there may not be a whole lot they can do to alleviate it.  

[Kaiserfamily]

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.

[GabeU]

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@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.

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Well, it's a niche service, and it's very expensive to provide.  It also has a much more restricted throughput than any ground based service, which is why those services tend to experience less congestion, though cable sometimes does.  Each satellite can only provide so much throughput/bandwidth, and that has to be split between thousands upon thousands of people.  When a lot of people are online it's just like traffic during rush hour, and because they can't easily expand their capacity like ground based services can to keep up with demand, congestion starts to happen.  The more people online, the worse it gets, and the worse it gets over time.   

[maratsade]

Xfinity experiences congestion all the time and customers are always complaining about it.

[MarkJFine · Accepted solution]

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.

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@@@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.

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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.

[Kaiserfamily]

That’s probably the best explanation I have received on here. I think the issue could also be equipment. The technician used existing dish network cable instead of new cable. The old cable may not be made as well or has a dead spot. The modem/router is also not high quality. I am curious if a nighthawk router would do better.

[MarkJFine]

Thanks. I had hoped it would help you and others understand.

[MarkJFine]

I'm confused. You only need tokens if you run out of your anytime data allowance. The tokens will get you out of Fair Access Policy (FAP) restricted data rates, but won't necessarily help fix buffering due to excessive latency and/or congestion.

So, are you really buying tokens because you're running out of data? And if that's the case, are you absolutely sure you're streaming at less than HD quality? HD uses some ungodly 3-5GB/hr...

[Kaiserfamily]

Yes I run out of data in a matter of a day or two so to ensure my data stream is strong and running at greater than 3 MB’s I buy tokens. If you run out of data you are throttled. So running at 25mbs streaming a 683 mb movie or less depending on the compression of the sd video should not buffer. If I am running 1 mbs then definitely it should buffer especially anything above 480pps, but I am running 25 mbs or faster.