Netflix and wireless routers

Today I bought my first wireless router. It's a Linksys N Ultra Range Plus priced a little under $80 from Target. I'm planning on buying a Blu-Ray player with bundled Netflix at some point so I wanted to set up a network beforehand.

I chose a wired connection to the router for my desktop PC. To test the wireless function I used my Asus netbook. I tried streaming a Netflix movie and it worked well...for awhile. The movies get interrupted at some point by a message saying my internet connecction has slowed so Netflix tries to adjust. The signal strength meter on the netbook indicates the router signal is excellent. When I tried the same movies with my desktop the problem does not occur. There's never been a problem using the desktop with Netflix.

The netbook is running XP with only 1 GB of RAM and the Atom processor is 1.6 GHz. Is it possible it's having trouble processing the data and Netflix mistakes that somehow for a weak connection? Does anyone think it's the router? When I originally shopped for a router this guy at Best Buy tried to sell me on a $150 router when I told him about my Blu-Ray/Netflix intentions. He talked about "port forwarding". After some research online I couldn't find much to back him up and justify the extra expense.

At the moment the netbook is one hour into streaming Die Hard with no issues. The problem isn't super consistent but again it never happens with my desktop. Anyone experience these issues with wireless Netflix devices or netbooks?

Wish I could help you. The only times I tried doing streaming movies from Netflix were on my desktop and it didn't go so well. Guess my internet connection is too slow...

Edd said:

Today I bought my first wireless router. It's a Linksys N Ultra Range Plus priced a little under $80 from Target. I'm planning on buying a Blu-Ray player with bundled Netflix at some point so I wanted to set up a network beforehand.

I chose a wired connection to the router for my desktop PC. To test the wireless function I used my Asus netbook. I tried streaming a Netflix movie and it worked well...for awhile. The movies get interrupted at some point by a message saying my internet connecction has slowed so Netflix tries to adjust. The signal strength meter on the netbook indicates the router signal is excellent. When I tried the same movies with my desktop the problem does not occur. There's never been a problem using the desktop with Netflix.

The netbook is running XP with only 1 GB of RAM and the Atom processor is 1.6 GHz. Is it possible it's having trouble processing the data and Netflix mistakes that somehow for a weak connection? Does anyone think it's the router? When I originally shopped for a router this guy at Best Buy tried to sell me on a $150 router when I told him about my Blu-Ray/Netflix intentions. He talked about "port forwarding". After some research online I couldn't find much to back him up and justify the extra expense.

At the moment the netbook is one hour into streaming Die Hard with no issues. The problem isn't super consistent but again it never happens with my desktop. Anyone experience these issues with wireless Netflix devices or netbooks?

Click to expand...

Few things:
The people that work at Best Buy are hacks that are after your money. They wanted $100 + labor to update a processor in my notebook. I did it in well under an hour, as a complete amateur.

The netbook also has garbage graphics capabilities. The processor is fine for most stuff, it's the graphics chip that would be my first suspect.

You can do port configuration with any router, but I haven't needed it for Netflix.

Linksys is in general a decent brand, I wouldn't necessarily suspect the router.

Have you tried the netbook wired?

mondeo said:

Have you tried the netbook wired?

Click to expand...

No but I will soon if the problem continues.

mondeo said:

Few things:
The people that work at Best Buy are hacks that are after your money. They wanted $100 + labor to update a processor in my notebook. I did it in well under an hour, as a complete amateur.

The netbook also has garbage graphics capabilities. The processor is fine for most stuff, it's the graphics chip that would be my first suspect.

You can do port configuration with any router, but I haven't needed it for Netflix.

Linksys is in general a decent brand, I wouldn't necessarily suspect the router.

Have you tried the netbook wired?

Click to expand...

I gotta admit, I take a bit of offense to the "people that work at Best buy are hacks" comment. Particularly in this economy.

I've been doing IT for over 10 years now, and when I was between jobs, I worked on the tech bench at best buy for about 8 months. Some of my co-workers didn't know what they were doing, but many of us did. The prices we charged the customers we all felt bad about. Those rates are set by corporate and have nothing to do with the guy behind the bench.

My brother has been working on the 'Geek Squad' (it was renamed shortly after I left) now for 5 years through the end of high school and now college. He didn't know a ton when he started, but he's learned quite a bit working there and would be able to hack it in a corporate IT helpdesk role now. The services exist at the store because there is a market for it. Obviously, you aren't that market (you had enough problem solving skills to figure out how to update your processor). Some people don't understand computers beyond "I click the blue E to get on the internet." Those are the customers that Best Buy is looking for.

In this economy where job cuts are everywhere and IT is being outsourced like crazy, many talented people have ended up doing retail IT. The price structure is still whacky, but don't blame the guy at the bench.

As for the original problem, I'd recommend trying the netbook wired as well. Also, were you streaming the video while the netbook was plugged in to power or was it running on battery? Many notebook and laptop PCs have a setting that changes the wireless adapter's performance depending on whether or not it was plugged in.

I wouldn't expect the graphics capability of the Netbook to hinder the playing of movies as it's just a 2 dimensional image, 3 dimensional images (i.e. games for the most part) are what really tax a graphics processor. Your bottlenecks are going to be network throughput (was anyone else using the wireless connection when you were streaming the move? Do you have any interference (i.e. other neighbors wireless networks, 2.4Ghz wireless telephones, etc) Updating the new router to the newest firmware from Linksys could help as well), Processor speed (the netbook is a slower machine by design, it might not be able to handle streaming netflix movies depending on the quality), and RAM (were there any other programs running in the background? how much RAM is in your system?)

Let me know if I can help in any other way.

-w

My netbook runs the Netflix streaming audio just fine...but I have a Verizon wireless router so I don't know if it's a good comparison.

I didn't need to make any special configuration settings.

Have you tried doing any upload/download speed tests on the netbook?

What do you have for anti-virus software?

This thread kind of misses the point.

It's pretty freakin' unlikely that the problem is with a particular home WiFi router.

In order of likelyhood:
* The broadband internet connection sucks. We don't know who he's using as a service provider or what technology he's using.

* His ISP has a traffic shaper on the line and rate limits his traffic after a while. Comcast uses Sandvine boxes to do this. If you stream video, they'll eventually start making it suck. They want you to pay for their video.

* His WiFi isn't secured. Several neighborhood kids discovered it and have hooked up the their BitTorrent client to it to steal media using his connection so they don't risk being sued by a movie or music company.

* His notebook computer sucks and some evil Microsoft application or a virus is making it run crappy.

* He has his WiFi configured so it's on the same frequency as somebody else's WiFi router. He's getting enough interference that it's dropping a lot of packets. ...or he has some electronic device that just got turned on that is emitting enough radio waves to drive the SETI project. The flying saucers will be landing tonight.


A "Wireless N" home router is a waste of money. His notebook computer probably, at best, supports G. N is like putting a 4" fuel line on a Yugo. Will it run slightly better? Maybe. There are many other parts of the solution that limit the speed. Broadband connections just aren't that fast. You use N in a corporate file server environment where there are actually things on the network that can push data at you with those speeds. Most people should buy the $30.00 Best Buy home router. That's what I run. My internet connection is no faster when I direct-connect to the cable modem with a Cat 5 Ethernet cable. If I were pushing big media files around a home network where I had RAID disk arrays, I'd spend the money.

Edd said:

When I originally shopped for a router this guy at Best Buy tried to sell me on a $150 router when I told him about my Blu-Ray/Netflix intentions. He talked about "port forwarding". After some research online I couldn't find much to back him up and justify the extra expense.

Click to expand...

All home routers support Network Address Translation. That is the function that relays the communication between Netflix and your PC or a BlueRay box. No consumer-oriented internet services require any functions beyond that. The $30.00 el-cheapo home WiFi router will work just as well as the $150.00 one he's trying to sell you.

If you have a really high performance Broadband connection like FIOS or UVerse where they can push data at you at 100 megabit/second, the home router is going to start to matter. If you're running a cable modem or DSL, the speeds are so slow that any will work just fine.

WJenness said:

I gotta admit, I take a bit of offense to the "people that work at Best buy are hacks" comment. Particularly in this economy.

Click to expand...

Obviously there are different levels of expertise, and I was assuming he was talking to someone in a blue shirt on the floor. They're generally just high school or college kids with fairly minimal training, and what they're taught by the store is just enough knowledge to get them to push the higher end stuff, like, as Geoff says, a 801.11n router for "future proofing" when even streaming video over a 801.11g is fine- Blu-ray maxes out at 40mbps, within 801.11g's 54mbps wall. The only reason I'm moving to 801.11n is anticipation of running clustered engineering analysis and potentially a HTPC/SAN combination, clustering and SANs benefitting from high data rates. The tech guys are better, but highly variable as you mention.

Netflix streams VC-1, which will be decoded by current notebook and desktop graphics cards, but not the chipsets that are packaged with the Atom. But if the message is connection is slowed, netbook hardware probably isn't the issue. Open up the task manager (ctrl-alt-del) and look at processor utilization during playback. With a single core and minimal decoding offload, look at it both while doing nothing but playback and while doing minimal multitasking. As long as CPU load doesn't approach 100%, you're fine. If you can sustain 100% load without getting reduced playback rate, that's another way to eliminate it as an issue. If you get the reduced playback while at 100%, then that's the problem.

Geoff has a few more good suggestions.

mondeo said:

The only reason I'm moving to 801.11n is anticipation of running clustered engineering analysis and potentially a HTPC/SAN combination, clustering and SANs benefitting from high data rates.

Click to expand...

Er, NAS, not SAN.

- The ISP is Comcast with a typical high-speed broadband connection

- The netbook was not running on battery power when the problem occurred.

- I set up the network to be secured so nobody else was sharing.

- No other programs were running.

- The Virus software has expired on the netbook so it wasn't running (I know, I know).

- Netbook has 1GB of Ram with a 1.6 GHz processor.

I was just using the netbook to test out the router. The intended use of the router is for a future Netflix streaming device (i.e. Blu-Ray player), a possible gaming console, and a second desktop when my GF and I share a place at some point. I will follow up on the CPU load suggestion as well as doing a speed test.

It's possible that a neighbor is using a 2.4 Ghz phone but there ARE other wireless networks close by. I just find it strange that the desktop works perfectly and the netbook has an issue with the same task, yet the message is that the internet connection these devices are sharing has "slowed".

Thank you for the suggestions. I'll keep playing with it.

Comcast service is typically pretty good but you can be on a cable modem upstream and downstream that happen to be congested. It all depends on what the other cable modems you're sharing with are doing for traffic.

As I said, Comcast has Sandvine traffic shapers in their networks. They mostly shape peer to peer traffic like BitTorrent clients that people use to steal music and movies. They probably also shape Netflix streaming video since it competes with them but they'd never admit it publicly.

My Comcast service in Killington is great. I doubt many users in the Rutland area do much of anything with their cable modem service and I'll bet I share frequencies with vacation home owners who aren't around all summer. Down in the flatlands in metro-Boston where there are more power users, it would go to shit during bad weather when everyone was surfing the internet instead of being outside. If it's pissing rain on a Saturday, you can bet the internet is running slowly.

For what it's worth, Comcast is in the process of upgrading their whole network to DOCSIS 3.0. The whole thing is going to get a lot faster. They needed to keep pace with Verizon FIOS which is in a lot of their footprint.

I watched a Netflix movie last night, streaming over Comcast and a wireless router to a ThinkPad, with no problems whatsoever.

Clearly, you're doing it wrong.

Have a beer.

It actually completed a full movie last night with no problems for the first time. I'm going to keep putting it through paces to isolate whatever the issue is. I have to say I'm impressed with how decent the streaming movies from Netflix look, even on the netbook. I can't wait to start streaming to my TV at some point.

I use my XBox for watching Netflix movies. It works great. It is a wired connection, though, so maybe it's not too relevant to this discussion

Geoff said:

As I said, Comcast has Sandvine traffic shapers in their networks. They mostly shape peer to peer traffic like BitTorrent clients that people use to steal music and movies. They probably also shape Netflix streaming video since it competes with them but they'd never admit it publicly.

Click to expand...

All Sandvines should be de-activated (and one would hope un-installed).

RootDKJ said:

All Sandvines should be de-activated (and one would hope un-installed).

Click to expand...

Nope. ...at least not according to a Comcast SVP I was visiting in Philly 3 weeks ago. He reports to Tony Werner, the CTO, so he should know. Their network would fall over if they let all the BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic run unshaped. Even with the traffic shapers, peer-to-peer chews up a 24x7 20% of their network capacity. They've had Sandvine fiddle with their algorithms so it's not intrusive to the video gamers or the first burst of peer-to-peer traffic from a customer. If you have a BitTorrent client sitting there sharing media 24x7, it's getting shaped. They can't let the DOCSIS upstream run flat out since they also run telephone service on it. The Comcast Digital Voice stuff takes priority. The rest of their customer base would get awful service if the BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic were allowed to run at full rate.

Geoff said:

Nope. ...at least not according to a Comcast SVP I was visiting in Philly 3 weeks ago. He reports to Tony Werner, the CTO, so he should know. Their network would fall over if they let all the BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic run unshaped. Even with the traffic shapers, peer-to-peer chews up a 24x7 20% of their network capacity. They've had Sandvine fiddle with their algorithms so it's not intrusive to the video gamers or the first burst of peer-to-peer traffic from a customer. If you have a BitTorrent client sitting there sharing media 24x7, it's getting shaped. They can't let the DOCSIS upstream run flat out since they also run telephone service on it. The Comcast Digital Voice stuff takes priority. The rest of their customer base would get awful service if the BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic were allowed to run at full rate.

Click to expand...

Not my area of expertise, but I have it on good authority, as sites go DOCSIS 3, they are incompatible, so they are being removed. Since only about 1/3 of Comcast is D3 ready, there's still a heavy deployment of Sandvines around. All of NJ/PA/DE is D3, so there are no Sandvines operational around here. They were all sent back to??? A D3 Sandvine-ish project is in devlopment at this time.

I know in the headend I'm served out of, there's no Sandvines in the racks.;-)