insufficient bandwidth

[cecil39]

what does this mean? please can someone tell me in plain English, it stops me watching anything on BBCIplayer, sometimes i can see a half hour show but not anything longer.

[sunny-dave]

"Bandwidth" is determined by how fast your broadband connection is actually running - not the theoretical 'up to 8meg' or whatever your broadband supplier quotes, but the actual speed in mbps (megabits per second) that you router is providing to your PC or television set.

You can test your connection speed here

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html

Any results under about 2.5mbps will mean that iPlayer is a bit flaky. Under 2mbps and it will be hard to watch much at all. I get 3.4mbps and it all works very nicely.

[Paul_M]

After you have selected your program, have a look further down the screen and sometimes you get the "lower bandwidth" option. Some times I have to use this as I have a slow connection, also programs delivered in HD are impossible for me to stream.

[cecil39]

thanks Dave, will give that a try.

[Harry-K]

Adverts in the press make out that they give super speeds by saying for example, 20Mb sec.
Most people think speed in Megabytes, not megabits and as there are 8 bits to a byte, 20Mb is only 2.5 Megabytes, not very fast at all.

Harry-K

[Aquariel]

Harry,

I think you've confused your bits and bytes! I don't know many people that talk about speeds in megabytes - they always say they have an 8 meg connection, or 50 meg, meaning megabits, that being a theoretical maximum.

2.5 megabytes (or 20Mbit) is quick - that would equate to about 2.5 megabytes per second. 2.5 megabit on the other hand, would be about 250K per second, which would be towards the slower end of broadband speeds these days.

[webbo3]

im getting 9.9 Mbps according to this site.

http://www.speedtest.net/


Dave.

[daffy654]

I just tested at 104.13Mbps with Dave's link :)
I do pay Virgin Media a lot of money for that speed though!

[Khandro]

According to Dave's link I get 3.6Mbps, I guess that's OK isn't it ? but daffy with 104.13 Mbps - that sounds by comparison enormous, are you sure the decimal point is in the correct place?

[sunny-dave]

Daffy is on Virgin media fibre - 104 meg is correct (and makes me very jealous)

:+)