5G Speed of 190Mbps not fast enough to stream NowTV according to NowTV!

[andydenyer]

The other week I was travelling from Waterloo station and wanted to stream a live football match on Sky Sports via the NowTV app.  However, it refused to stream, with a message that my speed was insufficient, despite the fact that Speedtest reported a speed of 190Mbps on the EE 5G connection!  Other streaming services such as iPlayer, BT Sport and Prime Video were fine.

When I connected to the onboard wi-fi instead, with a recorded speed of just 1Mbps, NowTV streamed fine!

I have raised this with NowTV who claim that the issue is with the number of devices connected to 5G and how much of the bandwidth is being made available for NowTV, to use and that I should take that up with my ISP - in this case, EE!

Has anyone else had any problems streaming NowTV when connected to EE 5G?

[Chris_B]

@andydenyer   With a speed of 190 I’ll say your being fob off by now TV.  If you had issues of streaming at 190 it would have buffed.    EE can not allocate the amount of bandwidth is being used for for now tv at any one time. 

[andydenyer]

That's exactly what I thought.  And the fact that I have not been having any problems with any other streaming service leads me to suspect that there is something fundamentally wrong with their app.

I actually wonder whether the speed is too fast, and for some reason the app just can't handle it and mis-interprets the speed as being something much less than it really is.  I've had old software unable to correctly report the amount of RAM or disc storage space I have in my PC, for example.

[EssexBoyEE]

NowTV will stream even at really low Speeds, say less than 0.3 mbs your just get a crappy picture, on NowTV a good 480p should be good or near perfect at around 1.2mbs, HD 720p should kick in around 2mbs and 1080p HD around 2.5 to 3.5mbs.

So it's not a speed or bandwidth issue, my money would be on your using a IPV6 or IPV4/6, can you change your device APN Setting to IPV4 Only and set Authentication to PAP., Reboot device and try again. 

[Chris_B]

@EssexBoyEE   I doubt it’s a IPV type issue as I can watch Now tv on my iPhone and I don’t have any control over IPV. 

@andydenyer   the next time this happens can you try changing the device to use 4G instead of 5G and come back here to let us know.  

[andydenyer]

Well, I was in London yesterday so thought I would give it a try it again when leaving Waterloo last night and it worked fine!