Xbox Live speed issue

SteevL

I've had my Xbox 360 for about a year now. I've been loving it, especially the XBLA stuff. It also came in handy when my brother got a Netflix account and was able to take advantage of their stuff via my Xbox.

About 2 weeks ago he said he was having trouble with the Netflix thing -- it'd just sit there at the "determining your video quality" screen, and in a few minutes a progress bar would appear, followed by an agonizing stop-resume-stop-resume of whatever he was watching. Yesterday I decided to look into it and just couldn't figure it out. It looks like the total connection speed has dropped dramatically. I started downloading the Ninja Blade demo as a test about 12 minutes ago, and it's only downloaded 5% so far (about 25 MB). As far as I can tell, there is no obvious reason for this speed drop.

Here's my setup and what I've done so far:

I use the official wireless adapter.

I tested my connection speed on my PC and got about 5500kbps down, 430kbps up.

Cleared the cache using the Y X X LB RB X X code.

Power cycled the wireless router.

Ran the network test in the 360's system settings and no issues came up -- full strength connection.

Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to hook the system up to a wired internet connection at the moment, which I think would help me determine if this was an issue with the wireless adapter.

That being said, does anyone have any ideas on how I could fix it? I'm hoping someone else has had a similar problem before.

mspencer

Could be a number of problems:
Your ISP could be throttling Netflix traffic specifically, and worse, they could be doing it in a way deliberately designed to frustrate the user's bandwidth detection algorithm.
You could be experiencing problems with wifi. Speaking as a ham radio geek, lightning generates bursts of broad-spectrum noise which can cause frames to be lost. It doesn't sound like you were experiencing a one time problem so I don't think it's storm related.

You know, Netflix streaming is one of the more demanding things you can ask of an Internet connection: you need consistent, high throughput and a low rate of lost packets. Even if your Internet connection is up to it, if your wireless connection has a high bit-error-rate due to RF interference, or if lots of nearby wifi users have partially saturated the band, you may not be able to throw that quantity of data reliably using that connection.

Also note that downloads don't really tell you if they are receiving data in surges, where the incoming stream surges quickly and then slows, surges and slows, etc. You might have a problem which only affects Netflix streaming.

SteevL

Well, I don't think my ISP (AT&T) is throttling Netflix because my brother was able to access the On-Demand service through his own computer, which I forgot to mention in the OP.

I'm pretty sure this problem is affecting my downloads too. That Ninja Blade demo I started downloading an hour ago is at the 49% complete mark. It's only 473 MB. I'm sure I've downloaded demos faster than that before.

SteevL

It's typical that the one day I could drag an old easier-to-move TV out of the closet so I could test my wired connection is also the day Xbox Live is down for maintenance.

(I hadn't moved the TV yet, but was planning on it)

urahonky

Have you opened the ports on your router? I've noticed that when I finally opened them up I consistently get HD quality on movies.

These are the ports:

• TCP 80
• UDP 88
• TCP/UDP 3074
• TCP/UDP 53

SteevL

I'll give that a shot tonight or tomorrow when the network is back up.