Netflix / video streaming & Load Balancing

Hi,

I often face a situation where multiple users are streaming video over the internet (Apple TV / Netflix etc).

The network is all Gigabit speed and the ISP (Comcast) measures +100mb down. Despite al this speed the users frequently experience slowdowns while streaming movies…

Wandering if using a Balance One where a 2nd ISP (ADSL…) might take of this problem…

Looking forward to your reply,

Rogier

1 Like

Hi,

Yes, Balance ONE with second ISP will enable load balancing on multiple video streaming sessions, eg. video stream 1 & 3 on WAN #1, while video stream 2 & 4 on WAN #2.

More information on Balance ONE can be found here.

Regards,
Wei-Ming

1 Like

The trouble you have, is the Balance is load sharing across different IP’s. :slight_smile:

If you take a close look at the Roku / Netflix traffic in action, you see it actually has several concurrent TCP sessions in use. It cycles through these as the movie plays, making new ones when it closes off old ones. I imagine it does this to combat ISP network control problems and does its own form of load sharing efforts too.

But when the Peplink splits up those TCP connection across various WAN’s, then Netflix sees one customer over multiple IP’s, and probably views this as a broken / lost customer connection, or an account sharing violation, and terminates.

To make Netflix work with Peplink, you need to put rules in place that keep each of your clients, firmly on one WAN during Netflix. Perhaps a Netfix subnet / client IP / forced Wan rule.

There is also a speed test video within Netflix, where is draws to screen the current bit rate. Search for a movie titled “Example Short 23.976”. The top speed attainable is 6 Mbps, but I doubt that Comcast will allow such a generous amount of bandwidth.

Thanks for your participation rossh_pl, your feedback is great!

It is also important to note that some ISP’s take drastic measures to limit this kind of traffic during peak hours, and this is outside the control of any router.

1 Like