Originally Posted by dubrov1:
“Any chance you can post their explanation?
It looks like there is a combination of poor service and smart DNS issues. The problem on HD12 wouldn't actually be an issue if you could select the quality of your stream. The option is there but it doesn't seem to work.”
Yeah, sure. Here's a reply from one of the emails:
Quote:
“It is unequivocally the CDNs and your ISP that are introducing the problem. More specifically, it's the link between your ISP and the CDN. You may think that that's just an excuse, but it is the way it is.
Sky, for example, will host Akamai (the CDN provider, in BeIN's case) hardware in their datacenters, and when you're using Sky's DNS servers you'll get pointed straight at those boxes rather than having to go out on the 'wider' internet to pull the content. It's effectively free for both Akamai, and Sky to maintain this peering arrangement, it saves Sky having to pay to transit your data.
When you're using our DNS servers, the Akamai content server will not be located so locally to you. If we pointed you at Sky's servers it'd have a negative effect on BT customers for example, and vice versa... the content servers we're pointed to (and therefore which we point you towards) are usually in the UK (although sometimes Germany), but if your ISP decides to traffic shape data travelling over these routes then you're just out of luck. It's not our fault, we just point you at the Akamai server that Akamai point us at... technically the extra layer of abstraction we have to introduce makes Akamai's job of determining YOUR fastest content server much more difficult, all they can do is provide the fastest server for US. Generally speaking these would be perfectly fine, but some ISPs traffic shape and deprioritise content pulled from outside their network in this way. Some other ISPs just have heavily utilised connections to these off-net locations, resulting in a similar symptom.
The only complete solution would be to change ISP to one which doesn't engage in either of these practises (Plusnet, for example, works particularly well), but I accept that that's not practical.
Ultimately, we don't touch the video data when using BeIN, at all. It's simply impossible for us to be to blame for a poor stream - all we do is tell your computer where to go to find the data... we do not and can not control the route used by your ISP to get there.”
They specifically refer to Sky because that's who my ISP is.
I'm now hoping that we can find somebody on here who uses an ISP such as Plusnet so we can see if their service is any better at times when issues are being reported here seeing as Overplay are unequivocally taking themselves out of the mix and placing the blame on the ISP's.
