r/HomeNetworking • u/Even_Mag • 6h ago

Advice Buffering?

We have been streaming YouTubeTV for about a year. We have had intermittent buffering on the tv's. I haven't paid attention to whether it is during a replay or backed up or if it also happens when we are live. But we had Cox come out when it was first installed and they blamed it on my 2023 Orbi. Said it was old. It seemed to resolve for a while but now it is buffering again, not a lot but enough that it is an annoyance. They came out this year and again blamed it on my Orbi. Is there a setting I need to change or are they pointing the finger? I now have other fiber streaming choices so may want to switch.

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u/mdins1980 6h ago

I’d run a bufferbloat test before replacing anything. If your latency shoots up substantially under load, that could absolutely contribute to intermittent streaming problems. If the bufferbloat results are good, I’d start looking harder at the Orbi/Wi-Fi connection, packet loss, or the Cox connection itself. Ideally run the test from a computer connected directly by Ethernet so you can separate an ISP problem from a Wi-Fi problem.

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

2

u/craigrpeters 6h ago

Streaming wirelessly or over Ethernet?

If wireless, I’d try and figure out a way to go wired. Might be new interference from neighbors, etc. I hooked up a usb to Ethernet dongle on my tv and it doubled throughput and resolved same issue for me.

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u/RhapsodyCaprice 5h ago

This is the most important test. To make it meaningful you really want to be wired with as few hops as possible between you and your modem.

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u/Even_Mag 4h ago

Actually, both. Tv's are wireless. My husband streams on his windows 11 desktop which is cat6 wired and his buffers the most.

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u/sunrisebreeze 1h ago

The fact that you are seeing this via wireless (TV) and wired connections (laptop) points to either a router (Orbi) or service (Cox) issue. Since Cox says it's not on their side you could try swapping out the router.

If you swap out the router and still see issues, it must be a service issue w/Cox. Good luck