> > If the local ISPs are limiting BBC traffic, would the situation be > improved by using Squeezenetwork or a proxy connection? Or maybe not, I > don't understand these things that well. > I was playing devil's advocate - there is no proof that the ISP are limiting data, just as there is no proof that the ISP network are overloaded or the BBC network feeds are overloaded. I may be wrong about network congestion but I have seen BBC server drop data before and one RealNetworks' explanations was network congestion.
Squeezenetwork is a broker not a relay - it just sets up connection addresses for your SB - once connected the data probably follows the same path. A proxy may vary the route but then the proxy could become the bottleneck assuming that your ISP or the BBC is not the problem. In these circumstances, there is very little a user can do besides make official complaints to BBC so they note a lot of unhappy listeners and check their server behaviour. Historical note. I started using AlienBBC 3 years ago and whenever one of these "dropouts" occurred the live stream became garbled and user had to restart the link (anybody remember the "garbled audio" bug). As a result most AlienBBC listeners just used "Listen Again". I spent about 2-3 months tracking down the bug in mplayer but I had to make network traces of hours of BBC broadcasting and then analyse them to understand the issue. These dropouts happen all the time - often they are very short and listeners don't notice. The problem occurred most often on Radio 4 Mon-Thur between 5.00 and 7.30pm, on Sunday roughly around Archer omnibus and also very late at night and on weekends (esp late Sat). When the problem happened on weekends often different servers were in use compared to weekday. So I associated the problem with network congestion and network maintenance when capacity is reduced. The BBC also seems to have organised their servers by region so one region could be experiencing lots of dropouts and other regions none at all. At the moment I believe the BBC is significantly changing how their network (e.g. moving from akamai to Level3 I think) is setup and this may be having adverse affects on the RealAudio servers. -- bpa ------------------------------------------------------------------------ bpa's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1806 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=52022 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/plugins
