Problems with Demand Five streaming

Or, more specifically the ads.

I've been trying to watch a catchup of a Channel Five programme which seemed to play pretty much OK (network activity was running at around 1Mbps) but the ads were almost impossible - taking about 10 minutes to stutter through a minute of content (network activity was running at around 100kbps). The other thing I noticed was that during ads the status bar says that data was being downloaded from "a995.e.akamai.net" and I wondered if the streaming of the ads was being squashed almost to oblivion by traffic management because they are coming from one of the rate-limited Content Distribution Networks.

How is streamed content from these networks managed & could something be done about letting the streams run? Its not that I particularly want to watch the ads but you can't skip them & with 4 lots of ads in the 1 hour programme I've just watched it added over 40 minutes to the time from start to finish!!!!

Might find your answer here http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,7957... look at post #130

Probably/possibly related.

In my case, browsing was fine & the Channel Five programme was streaming fine it was just the ads from Akamai that were almost completely stalling. If it isn't the traffic management gone wrong - not differentiating streaming from general downloads from the same source - then it is more-than-likely linked to the problems with the Ellacoya capacity.

I tried 4OD before turning in last night & that worked fine - ads & all, but they weren't coming from Akamai. Demand Five ads seems to be OK now, but I have had to reboot the router this morning (it seems not to like establishing a usable connection after a resynch, but that's another story) so I'm probably on a different gateway - forgot to make a note of what I was on last night - even if nothing else has changed.