Have an interesting observation that hopefully someone can help shed some light on.
I have 200Mbps internet service and an ASUS RT-AC88U wireless router.
Got rid of cable TV and just stream everything now through HBO, Netflix and Hulu Plus.
Physical location of my router is 12inches below my Apple TV 4th Gen so I direct connected it figuring it would give a more stable connection and leave the Wifi open for all the other devices.
Apple TV is only 10/100, but I did get consistent 80Mbps speeds on the Speedtest app, which is plenty of speed for Hulu which says you only need 3Mpbs for on-demand and 8Mbps for Live TV streaming.
However, I constantly had issues with Hulu Live freezing, skipping, fast forwarding to get back in sync, image quality dropping and pretty much unstable service. It seemed to be on certain channels more than others and certain things like highly viewed events, like sporting events, sometimes were worse. But, Hulu on-demand worked great.
If you read Hulu's user support forums there are a number of people complaining about the same issues and the "Live" aspect of Hulu is relatively new as it just went out of beta phase so I wrote it off as a Hulu issue.
But what confused me was Hulu Live on wifi on my iPhone or Macbook worked much better.
Only other wired devices on my router are my PS4, a Macmini and HP Z820, but they weren't active when streaming issues happen (may be on, but no active internet use).
Well that brings me to the most recent change I made when I got fed up with a movie constantly freezing while watching it.
The RT-AC88U has a 5Ghz wifi channel. All my other Wifi devices, iPhone, iPad, Raspberry Pis, Macbooks are all on the 2.4Ghz. And considering there is no distance concern with my Apple TV being only 12" away from my router I decided to remove the ethernet connection and connect Apple TV to the 5G channel.
The same movie that was freezing every few minutes and kept having the image quality drop has now been streaming without any issues with HD quality video for the past hour on 5G.
I have a decent background in IT networking, but mainly deal with server to client connections for video editing and network storage. I don't have much experience with Wifi networking. But, my knowledge would tell me that a wired ethernet connection would give a more stable connection for streaming. And yes I did test my ethernet cable with a Fluke tester and its fine and even tried other cables for testing purposes.
So can anyone shed any light on why the Wifi channel on my router is giving me a much better streaming experience?
I found some posts saying to enable IGMP Snooping and AMPDU to help improve Wifi streaming.
Is that the case that the Wifi aspect of the router has more capabilities to improve streaming experiences?
I have 200Mbps internet service and an ASUS RT-AC88U wireless router.
Got rid of cable TV and just stream everything now through HBO, Netflix and Hulu Plus.
Physical location of my router is 12inches below my Apple TV 4th Gen so I direct connected it figuring it would give a more stable connection and leave the Wifi open for all the other devices.
Apple TV is only 10/100, but I did get consistent 80Mbps speeds on the Speedtest app, which is plenty of speed for Hulu which says you only need 3Mpbs for on-demand and 8Mbps for Live TV streaming.
However, I constantly had issues with Hulu Live freezing, skipping, fast forwarding to get back in sync, image quality dropping and pretty much unstable service. It seemed to be on certain channels more than others and certain things like highly viewed events, like sporting events, sometimes were worse. But, Hulu on-demand worked great.
If you read Hulu's user support forums there are a number of people complaining about the same issues and the "Live" aspect of Hulu is relatively new as it just went out of beta phase so I wrote it off as a Hulu issue.
But what confused me was Hulu Live on wifi on my iPhone or Macbook worked much better.
Only other wired devices on my router are my PS4, a Macmini and HP Z820, but they weren't active when streaming issues happen (may be on, but no active internet use).
Well that brings me to the most recent change I made when I got fed up with a movie constantly freezing while watching it.
The RT-AC88U has a 5Ghz wifi channel. All my other Wifi devices, iPhone, iPad, Raspberry Pis, Macbooks are all on the 2.4Ghz. And considering there is no distance concern with my Apple TV being only 12" away from my router I decided to remove the ethernet connection and connect Apple TV to the 5G channel.
The same movie that was freezing every few minutes and kept having the image quality drop has now been streaming without any issues with HD quality video for the past hour on 5G.
I have a decent background in IT networking, but mainly deal with server to client connections for video editing and network storage. I don't have much experience with Wifi networking. But, my knowledge would tell me that a wired ethernet connection would give a more stable connection for streaming. And yes I did test my ethernet cable with a Fluke tester and its fine and even tried other cables for testing purposes.
So can anyone shed any light on why the Wifi channel on my router is giving me a much better streaming experience?
I found some posts saying to enable IGMP Snooping and AMPDU to help improve Wifi streaming.
Is that the case that the Wifi aspect of the router has more capabilities to improve streaming experiences?
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