Our servers, measured from where you are
Every peak is one answer from our servers, as it arrives.
Each part of the service, and its record
What follows is what we declare, not what a script guesses. Each strip is the last ninety days as they were recorded: a day turns amber or red only because an interruption was declared on it. Days before we started keeping this record stay grey - we will not colour a past nobody watched.
Share of requests our server answered during this visit.
Round trip to our server
one sample every two secondsThe share of requests our servers answered while you have been on this page, measured in your own browser. This is the figure that describes us. The three below describe the road between your home and us, which is a different thing and is where almost every complaint actually comes from.
Your connection to us, right now
These three are about your line, not our servers. A perfect service still travels through your provider and your Wi-Fi to reach the screen.
Why a fast line can still stutter
Your player keeps a few seconds in hand and plays out of that reserve, never straight from the wire. Everything below is that reserve. Break it three different ways and watch what reaches the screen.
Break it on purpose
This is a drawing of a mechanism, not a measurement of your line. It is here because it explains the one thing a speed test never shows: two of the three faults above have nothing to do with how fast your connection is.
Internet stability and IPTV diagnostic
Everything above is green, but the picture still stutters? Then the answer is on your side of the wire. The figures at the top of this page are already being measured against our own server, continuously, while you read - which is the route that actually matters for your playback. What follows explains what they mean and what to do about them.
Why IPTV sometimes buffers
Some providers apply traffic shaping, or route international traffic through a long detour. Latency and packet loss climb, and a plain speed test still looks fine because it measures a server next door rather than the one you are actually watching from.
That is why the figures above are taken against our server and not a generic one: they follow the route your playback really takes.
Four things that usually help
What happens when a server goes down
No infrastructure is never interrupted, and any page that claims otherwise is selling something. What separates a good service from a poor one is not the absence of faults, it is how quickly one is noticed, moved around, and said out loud.
Each edge is polled continuously from outside our own network. Polling a machine from inside itself proves nothing: it has to be asked from where you are.
One slow answer is normal. A run of them is not. When an edge stops answering, or starts answering late, support is woken up rather than told the next morning.
The clusters are geo-redundant: playback is pointed at a neighbouring edge while the faulty one is worked on. Most viewers see a re-buffer, not an outage.
The banner at the top of this page changes state, and support answers with the same words. You should never have to guess whether it is us or you.
Look at the top of this page. If the route to our server is green and the picture still stutters, the fault is between your player and your provider, and the seven checks further down find it. If this page turns amber or red, it is ours and we are already on it.
Watching from abroad, region by region
Distance is physics: the further the stream travels, the longer the round trip and the more chances it has to be re-routed badly. Here is what to expect where you are, and what actually helps.
Time zones we are written to from most often. Support answers around the clock, every day - so the hour where you are is never a reason to wait until morning.
What each figure means for IPTV
The same four numbers come back in every diagnosis. Here is what they do to a picture, and where the line sits.
How long a request takes to reach the server and come back. It decides how quickly a channel opens, not whether it plays smoothly. Only past 800 ms does zapping start to feel heavy.
How much that time varies. Voice calls need this under 30 ms because they play live, with nothing held in reserve. Video is not live in that sense: your player holds seconds ahead, so tens of milliseconds change nothing you can see.
Data that never arrives. Even one per cent is visible as blocks in the image or a freeze. Wi-Fi is the usual source, far more often than the provider.
How much data can arrive per second. It sets the quality ceiling and nothing else: past the point where the stream fits, more speed changes nothing at all.
Fix it yourself, in order
Seven checks, arranged so that each one rules out a cause the next cannot. Walk them with the arrows, or jump straight to one. The point is not only to repair it, but to learn where the fault sits, so that if you do write in you already know what to tell us.
The three faults behind almost every complaint
After enough tickets, the pattern is short. Knowing which of the three you have saves everyone a day.
Wi-Fi shared with a full household, a router in a cupboard, an old band. The picture blocks at the busy hours and is perfect at seven in the morning.
Proof: it works on a cable, or on mobile data.Traffic sent the long way round, or shaped at peak time. A speed test looks perfect because it measures a server down the road, not the one you are watching from.
Proof: a VPN to a nearby country fixes it instantly.A buffer set too low, an old application, a box short of memory. One channel fails and the rest are fine, or one device fails and the others are fine.
Proof: the same line plays cleanly on another device.Questions about connection quality
The ones support is asked most, answered the way we would answer them in the chat.