Is anyone else's running slooowwwwlllyyy?

[Kevin Reilly]

On 09/07/2011 14:14, Clive wrote:

> Last few days, my get_iplayer downloads from R4 and R4Ex are painfully 
> slow - often slower than listening in real time. Then, sometimes, if I 
> close the dos box and try again, it comes down like a train. Anyone else 
> experiencing problems like this? And I had enormous problems getting one 
> of the Afghanistan programs in HD - and I tried on two computers.

Can't help but notice you're another Virgin Media customer. There were a
couple of us saying something similar a few days ago.

I had my suspicions that someone, either the BBC or Virgin, were
throttling the speed of iPlayer downloads. The longer this has gone on and
the more evidence has presented, the more inclined I am to think it's Virgin.

It might not be deliberate. I have had issues in the past with YouTube
buffering at insanely low speeds, which a network trace has confirmed was
because of something in the Virgin network, either a bad peering
arrangement or a transparent proxy.

I think they might be doing something similar with iPlayer. Closing and
re-starting the session does sometimes improve the speed, suggesting that
there are a pool of proxy machines and/or peering routers and that it's
pot luck whether or not you get one that's on a go-slow.

Of course it will be almost impossible to get Virgin to acknowledge, or
even assist in confirming, this as their first-tier support are
notoriously ill-informed on technical matters. And they could always
counter with the argument that as long as iPlayer is buffering at
real-time speeds or slightly better, it's up to the task. In fact it may
be that it's only those of us trying to slurp programmes at maximum speed
that are seeing this as a problem.

For what it's worth I had this problem a couple of mornings back and
switched from my 20Mb Virgin connection to an HSPA connection on a 3G MiFi
and the speed went UP marginally. It'll be interesting to hear if anyone
with an ISP other than Virgin is seeing these slowdowns. As far as I can
cell so far it's been 100% Virgin customers.

-- 
Kev
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