My home network is Virginmedia 150 mbps and there's an ethernet link straight to the next room with the tellybox. So, I take the cable from a gigabit hub and stick it in my laptop. Ookla tells me I'm getting 155 to 165 mbps (which is nice). I take the exact same cable, unlug it from my laptop and stick it in the telly's ethernet socket, fire up the TV browser and check Ookla again. This time it reckons 25 to 55 mbps. Do they really put a shitty ethernet card in an expensive Smart TV or is there some other reason?
Might sound stupid, but is it definitely running over ethernet and not WiFi? That's if the WiFi had been previously setup at all.
No, I turned the wifi off. I was getting around the same speed on wifi. Bit perplexed but not too bothered as long as it's stable and fast enough for a 4K stream. Just tried another laptop and that also gets the full speed.
Long answer:
Data transfer on embedded devices is notoriously awful. An i/O interface for 100 or even 1gbit is relatively expensive, especially if the device could never realistically use the bandwidth. Take the raspberry pi as an example - has a good processor, good amount of ram etc., but data throughput is terrible as a single bus is used for everything. Having separate busses would increase the cost significantly (they've published some blog articles on this, quite interesting reading on the economics of design).
Also, the expensive smart TV browser is probably a java based app running on a fairly shitty vm on a very shitty processor and probably can't begin to handle data at 150mb/s.
Short answer: yes, your TV has a shit network card.
Seems odd though to market a telly to handle a 4K stream which the two major network suppliers say needs around 25 mbps, with a network card that can only just pass that through. I suppose the argument is that HDMI has plenty of bandwidth and t'web is just for extras.
Curiously enough, I see that my telly has the quad core ARM Cortex A53 - same as the Pi3.
The pi3 will manage about 70 or 80 mbps, with the caveats that it's running a proper os/browser combo, and as long as there's no other io going on - ethernet, USB and sd card all share a bus, and they're call reliant on the cpu to control everything. I imaging the TV is the same, but I suspect (guessing, really) that the OS is java based which is always* a terrible idea for performance.
*yes, always.
Seems reasonable. The OS on the telly is LG WebOS 3 which is Linux diddled about with for LG devices. The web browser app is very limited. No idea whether it's Java, though it may be. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the various tasks rely on a single shared bus. Detail is hard to come by but it seems that many of the SoC functions that would probably be hardware based in a computer are implemented in software and this includes some parts of of the network layers.
So, in short, using a crap TV browser app that probably has a low priority on a shared data bus via a largely virtual SoC, is probably not the best way to discover the network speed through the ethernet socket, or to determine exactly how and how fast the telly will actually handle the data when streaming (which presumably IS an optimised process).
Isn't webos from the palm pre? I always wanted one of them, then they killed it.:(
Yeah, it was. There seem to be three versions: LG, Open, and HP/Palm although the Wikipedia explanation was too boring for me to concentrate through.
My telly has a USB3 socket but I'm reasonably certain the telly will expect any data coming through it to be image or video files rather than network data.
Makes sense, the 100 mbit lan port is slower than the USB 2 interface. I imagine the use case is streaming only, though, as the USB interface will quickly saturate if you're expecting all that data to to disk (as it's gigabit - > USB bus - > cpu - > USB bus - > sd card/external USB drivr
Let me know what speed OOKLA displays in the browser...
Just a quick follow up. I've now tried a whole bunch of different speed tests and I'm beginning to suspect that the OOKLA app is the dodgy one.
Using my laptop, all agree that the speed squirting out of the patch cable is between 145 and 165 mbps. Using the telly, OOKLA says between 18 and 25, Netflix's own diagnostics is consistent at 33.5, and all the other web based tests (I tried 5 different ones) returned between 65 and 108.
Netflix is looking at its own streaming servers and that's probably what its app is using. As all the other web based apps returned a far higher result than OOKLA I think that it (which is a beta in any case) is probably not playing nicely with WebOS and the television.
Bored now...
EDITED: 18 Jan 2017 19:22 by WILLIAMA
Well if you're getting 108 then it should handle high bitrate stuff fine enough. All depends on the server pushing at the other end!
Ookla annoys me. Don't know about other ISPs, but on virgin it always defaults to a speed test server hosted by VM at your local VM connection point thingy. That's great for telling me the quality of my line, but doesn't give much insight to real speed.
If VM are hosting the server then a) no traffic is going on to the Internet, so it's not an Internet connection speed test anymore, and b) if VM are hosting the server, then they can traffic shape the transfer and ensure I get a top speed even when their network is congested and running like a pigs arse.
It did exactly the same when I tried it on WebOS (this was the beta non-flash version). In this case, the other servers gave similar results.
The VirginMedia way of working is strange and made worse by the hugely old-fashioned technology that makes up the majority of their consumer base. It's no wonder they fiddle their bandwidth figures, like Volkswagon whose cars run on fairy tears and emit honey and angel farts.
They have a unique client server model, that nobody who ever ran a client server setup was ever stupid enough to imagine - except them. 10% of their cable network is reserved for things like iPlayer, catch up. Netflix etc. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is they also stick ordinary interactions with the set-top boxes there. Press a menu button and your Tivo nips off onto the cable network alongside Netflix and Angry Birds to check what to do and get the next screen. Just about possible so far - except - they divide up that 10% in equal geographic chunks. The bad news is that if you have 50 people in your chunk playing Angry Birds and watching Netflix, it may take you 30 seconds just to get to the channel you've selected from the menu, that took you another 30 seconds to get to. And of course, they divide up broadband the exact same way.
Ah, so that's why the tivo box is do slow? Sounds a bit daft.
When I switched back to virgin (about 18 months ago) there was huge network congestion issues, pretty much unusable at peak times. They did some upgrades and I've got to say it's been pretty flawless since. Can max out my 200mb line downloading steam games, xbox games etc. Wanted to play borderlands the other week, xbox said it needed a 4 gig update. By the time I'd made coffee and a sandwich it was ready to go.
I can't really complain about speeds either. No idea how busy the network is locally but when I moved in there wasn't any BT fibre, only about 4mbps ADSL so Virgin was the only reasonable option. If only the upload was better.