Thanks very much! Ill give it a try.

Does anyone else on HeyBroadband have this issue?
It's most common on Prime video, and perhaps with HDR UHD, although not certain on that....

Edited by Henry8 (Mon 05-Jun-23 09:39:26)

I'm also on Hey, and as we have 2 small kids, we watch a lot of Prime/Netflix/Disney in 4k HDR - this is one issue I can safely say we have never had (though Hey have been creative and given us many other issues over the past 13 months!).

That said, I do not use their garbage router (I have one of their TPLink boxes in bridge only mode) so I wonder if its down to the poor quality of their kit.

Thanks for the reply.

I run my own router and when I failover to backup WAN it's fine so I know it's something in the Hey network.

Out of interest, do you mind sharing your WAN IP (Im interested if we are in the same subnet). (Dont share the whole thing for privacy reasons - put an x in the last 1 or 2 octets.)

Thanks!

The bandwidth requirements for most streaming services are pretty small e.g. no more than around 45Mbit for BBC UHD which I think is probably the highest. Prime and Netflix is a bit lower so given your BQM is pretty clean I'm wondering if it is something else.

Have you done a bufferbloat check?

https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat

Thanks for the idea.

Doesnt bufferbloat only come into play when the connection is loaded? (My issue presents when nothing else is using the connection, and as you say, the stream itself wont load it much.)

If nothing else you can provide the ISP with as much data as possible to show the issue is possibly on their side.

Yep - fair point.

So far though, all the usual data points (download bufferbloat, ping, latency, packet loss) can all be good when the issue occurs...

Are you using a Hey-supplied router, i.e. different router than you had with FTTC? Then it could be the router itself glitching, and/or a wifi problem if you're on wifi. The best way to rule that out would be to try a different router for a while.

Otherwise, can you tell if you're behind a CGN?

1. Periodically check what public IP address other sites on the Internet see you using, e.g. at https://ip4.me/ - or if you want to log this automatically, then use https://ip4.me/api/

If this changes at the same time as your perceived connection drops, then that would strongly point to an issue.

2. If you're able to log into the router, check what IP address it has been allocated on its 'WAN' port. If that's different to (1), you're behind a CGN. Also if it's 100.64.0.0 to 100.127.255.255, or any other private address like 10.x.x.x or 192.168.x.x or 172.16-31.x.x, then you're behind a CGN.

However, if your router's WAN address is the same as the IP address people on the Internet see you using, and it's not changing, then that's not the problem. This would then suggest an intermittent problem within Hey's network or with their transit routing/peering.

Hi - great Qs.

I am using the same router as I was with FTTC.

I have a public IPv4 address.

Any ideas what could cause an intermittent issue such as this?