OBS problems with 4G/LTE internet

[alistermorton]

Had the same problem with a dedicated pocket hotspot, Tom - using an ordinary SIM wasn't very useful, with data throttling, but putting in a data only SIM solved the problem. Edited November 5, 2020 by alistermorton

[timsabre]

It's a generic sim but I checked with O2 and they say there is no limitation or throttling for data only usage or "tethering". Might not be true though, I wasn't all that confident they knew what they were talking about.

 

I would have thought throttling would show up on a speedtest though. If I do a speedtest while OBS is going slow, I still get full speed.

Edited November 5, 2020 by timsabre

[Jivemaster]

Is anything overheating in any of the boxes? My laptop's way of telling me that it needed a new internal fan was to go really slow. Give it a replacement fan and it was fine and fast again.

[J Pearce]

I would have thought throttling would show up on a speedtest though. If I do a speedtest while OBS is going slow, I still get full speed.

 

That depends if the throttling is on your whole connection or on that specific traffic flow. What have you got setup in QoS on the Draytek? I wonder if the Draytek is throttling that flow for some reason.

[dmxlights]

I have done about 6 hours in one run streaming to facebook and youtube at the same time over 4g and had no problems but the software I used was vmix. I was using vodafone and it a data sims in one of their modems. I did try OBS and I found it work funny on my laptop (something to do with my usb ports can't remember what is was now) and then I tried vmix and had no problems.

 

Try Vmix and see if it has a problem

 

[timsabre]

Just to complete this question, I changed providers to VOXI (a rebrand of Vodafone) and the problem has disappeared. So clearly a problem with Giffgaff or O2. The vodafone signal strength is better at the location so I am not sure if it was just unreliable signal causing a dropout which OBS couldn't recover from, or if they really were throttling the data. I had tried VMix instead of OBS on the O2 network and that had similar problems, stopping streaming and restarting would get that working again as well, so probably does look more like throttling or network congestion or something.

Anyway the vodafone SIM gave me 30MBit down and 25MBit up which is a better "up" speed than my fibre to the house connection at home.

 

[OddSocks]

I have started to pick up some work live streaming funerals for churches.

Due to the nature of most church buildings and the rural areas I'm getting work I have started using Spedify.

Not tried it fully yet but I was running a stream the other day using an ethernet 4G modem running on EE and a USB 4G modem running on O2. At the end of the service I was packing up and disconnected the main modem that it was using and it switched to the secondary modem without a glitch.

 

[GaryNattrass]

As a side note anyone getting into streaming may be interested in checking out this company, I recently got this device for my test IPTV project: https://www.tbsiptv....der_and_decoder

 

They also have a UK distributor and the software is very comprehensive, they also offer lower cost encoding options if you don't need NDI or H265: https://www.pciex.ne...s/hdmi-encoders

Edited December 10, 2020 by GaryNattrass

[richardash1981]

As another data point, I have done two services now using a pay-as-you-go "Three" SIM without any problems (in a good signal area, speed check said 10Mbit upload available).I used the internal 4G modem of my laptop (HP EliteBook 840 G3 with Qualcom Snapdragon X5 modem) using OBS to feed YouTube.

 

[J Pearce]

It’s important to note that upload speed is not everything. Jitter and dropped packet count are just as important. I had a connection that read as 30Mbps upload, but failed to maintain a good stream as it kept dropping packets. In that case a 6Mbps 4G connection was more reliable than the wired connection.

[timsabre]

Our Voxi/Vodafone solution has been rock solid since I posted the above.

The big question is how do you find out which is going to be a good network for a particular location. 3 is rubbish round here for some reason but it looks great on the coverage maps.

 

[mark_h]

You can find out where your local cell towers for each network are using Cellmapper which may also help with positioning equipment. To determine whether the tower has capacity running speed tests using test sim cards will provide the best data.

[timsabre]

You can find out where your local cell towers for each network are using Cellmapper which may also help with positioning equipment. To determine whether the tower has capacity running speed tests using test sim cards will provide the best data.

 

As Jon said above, speed test doesn't tell the full story for video streaming. Using O2 we were getting a good reading for upload speed on speedtest but for whatever reason it could not sustain a video stream.