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SKYPE issues

N

Nostalgia

I have seen a lot of comments about stations using SKYPE for remotes. Here is an issue we have recently had and I wonder if anyone else has experienced it and found a cure.

During some recent skype sessions we have lost our streams. When we end the skype session our modem does not reconnect the streams and I have to power cycle the modem, router, and switch to get everything back on the air.

We have cable high speed internet, 20mb download, 1.6mb upload. 2 Barix boxes: 1 instreamer STL sending stereo MP3 stream to the transmitter, 1 extreamer pulling a lower quality stream from the air monitor at the TX site so we can hear our actual transmitted audio. Plus normal internet traffic: emails, 3 sat receivers plugged in, ect.

I spoke with our ISP tech guy and he said SKYPE grabs all available bandwidth as he put it to maintain a QOS or quality of service. He had no suggestions as to how to configure it to deal with this. Doesnt happen everytime but seems to be more frequent recently. Any suggestions from you IT types?
 
If you could set Qos on the other things, maybe Skype couldn't steal it etc. Also, the quality of the router has a lot to do with problems like this sometimes. If you are just using cheap consumer stuff, that might be the issue. Try an Apple router and see if it behaves a bit better... (better quality consumer)
 
It may be just network congestion. A friend who runs our local ISP tells me that Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc. are killing him. Despite having decent speed - I get about 10 down and 8 up - I can tell when everyone comes home and starts downloading movies and videos. It eats up bandwidth in a big time way. A lot of infrastructure was never designed to carry that much simultaneous information.

Since most sports remotes take place in the evening, that is going to be your biggest "problem time." Where I live, you can watch things slow down about 5:00 PM and it tapers off about 10:00 PM.

I suspect this problem may get a lot worse as people drop cable and satellite in favor of the Net.
 
This country must dedicate itself to a "Marshall Plan" mindset to vastly upgrade our infrastructure. It's not sexy, but absolutely necessary if the internet has any chance of reaching its potential. Virtually every part of America could become a 'shovel ready' project. My family is relegated to dial up, even though a Suddenlink line is less than 7/10 of a mile from my house. With the monies we waste on people in other countries that hate us and our way of life, we could do this.
 
@greg Maybe a neighbor could "accidently" point a wireless your way.Got clear line of sight??Yeah,that's it,the old hidden wireless trick...
 
Without actually seeing the logs, it sounds like you are saying your router locks up and has to be power-cycled. As someone said before, if that is the case, you have a router that is incapable of handling a heavy load of traffic and has a firmware issue that causes it to freeze. While you don't have to spend $1500 on a router, if you are using something less than pro-sumer routing hardware, there is a greater likelihood of issues.

Trying running your router make/model on a search to see if anyone else has had similar issues. For awhile a couple years back, the D-Link and some Netgear consumer stuff had terrible firmware issues.
 
Chuck said:
I suspect this problem may get a lot worse as people drop cable and satellite in favor of the Net.
Click to expand...

The good news for now is that in some communities there is a very competitive fight between industries.

AT&T bombards me with mail and phone calls wanting me to drop my cable and get my video via their U-verse concept. Comcast bombards with with mail and phone call wanting me to drop my phone company and get my phone service via their cable. How much proprietary interconnect the cable company uses for video-on-demand and how much of that ends up helping glut the Internet back-bone, I don't know.

For now, I remain resolute and bull-headed. I refuse to put everything with one vendor. I want to see some shakeout, some handwriting on the wall before I do that.
 
Thanks for all comments and suggestions. I am running a Linksys router and 8 port switch, but it is the cable companies modem that is locking up. At the suggestion of the ISP I power cycle all three units because we have both static IPs and equipment running DHCP and he said that was the way to have everything come back online.

So for now we are shelving any future SKYPE sessions until we sort this out.
 
Bad that the modem locks up. Understatement of the year, right? Can they swap you out another modem? If it's locking up, there is either a hardware or firmware issue in the modem.
 
Greg Goodfellow said:
This country must dedicate itself to a "Marshall Plan" mindset to vastly upgrade our infrastructure. It's not sexy, but absolutely necessary if the internet has any chance of reaching its potential. Virtually every part of America could become a 'shovel ready' project. My family is relegated to dial up, even though a Suddenlink line is less than 7/10 of a mile from my house. With the monies we waste on people in other countries that hate us and our way of life, we could do this.
Click to expand...
100% AMEN!
 
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