Why IPTV buffers at 8pm on a Saturday (and the 4 fixes that actually work)

By Callum Reid · Support lead at CosyTelly · 5 min read

Every Saturday around ten to eight we get the same message. “It was perfect all week, now it’s buffering.” Here is what is actually happening, and the four things that fix it, in the order we ask people to try them.

First, the thing nobody tells you

Your broadband speed is not one number. The figure your provider sold you is what the line can do at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday. At 8pm on a Saturday, with half the street streaming, gaming and on video calls, the same line is sharing a much busier pipe. Full fibre handles it well. Older cable and copper lines sag, sometimes by a third.

A live 4K stream needs a steady 20 to 25 Mbps the whole time. Not on average. The whole time. A line that dips to 12 Mbps for ten seconds during a corner kick will buffer, even if the speed test an hour earlier said 70. That is why a channel can run flawlessly on a weekday and stutter on match night, and why “but I pay for 100 meg” doesn’t settle it.

So the fixes below are not about making your broadband faster. They are about giving the stream a steadier path to the telly, and giving it less to carry.

Fix 1: get off Wi-Fi, or at least off the crowded band

Nine out of ten buffering messages we get are from a device on Wi-Fi in a different room from the router. Wi-Fi through two walls on a Saturday night, with every neighbour’s router shouting on the same channels, is the weakest link in the whole chain.

The best fix is a cable. A Firestick takes a cheap Ethernet adapter. Smart TVs and boxes nearly all have a port on the back. A ten-metre flat cable along the skirting board costs less than a takeaway and ends the problem permanently.

If a cable is impossible, use the 5 GHz band. Most routers broadcast two networks, one often named with “5G” or “5GHz” on the end. It is faster and far less congested, and it is the one your telly should be on. The catch is range: it does not go through walls as well, so if the router is downstairs and the telly is upstairs, move one of them or add a mesh node.

Fix 2: drop to the HD version of the channel

Every popular channel in your list comes in more than one quality. The 4K version is the one that needs 25 Mbps. The Full HD version needs about 10. The HD version needs less again, and on a 55-inch telly across the room, you will struggle to tell the difference during a match.

When a stream stutters, this is the quickest fix there is: back out, pick the same channel with FHD or HD in the name, and carry on. We would rather you watch the whole second half in Full HD than miss three minutes of it in 4K. Switch back when the busy period passes.

Fix 3: restart the thing that has been on for a month

Routers and streaming sticks are small computers that nobody ever turns off. After weeks of uptime they fill up with half-finished connections and run slowly. On a Saturday night that is enough to tip a borderline stream into buffering.

Unplug the router for thirty seconds and plug it back in. On a Firestick, hold Select and Play together for five seconds to restart it. Close the other apps on the stick. Do this before the match, not during, because the router takes a couple of minutes to settle.

While you are there, check nothing else in the house is eating the line. A games console downloading an update, a laptop backing up to the cloud or a second telly on a 4K stream will each take a big slice at exactly the wrong moment.

Fix 4: if one channel misbehaves and the rest are fine, tell us

If every channel buffers, it is your connection, and the three fixes above sort it. If one channel buffers while the others play perfectly, that is on our side. A single feed can have a bad night, and we can switch it or move you to another server in a few minutes.

Message us on WhatsApp with the channel name, the device and the time. That is all we need. What we cannot do much with is “it’s buffering” on its own, because the fix depends on which of the two problems it is.

The order to try things, so you don’t miss the goal

1. Switch to the FHD or HD version of the channel. Ten seconds.
2. Close other apps on the stick or TV, and check nothing else in the house is downloading.
3. If you are on Wi-Fi, move to the 5 GHz network, or closer to the router.
4. At half time, restart the router and the device.
5. If it is still only one channel, message us.

And the long-term fix

Run a cable to the main telly. We say it to everyone and the ones who do it never message again. Second best is a mesh Wi-Fi system with a node in the same room as the television. Third is simply making the TV the only thing on 5 GHz on Saturday evenings. Any of the three turns a borderline connection into a boring, reliable one, and boring is exactly what you want from your telly at kick-off.

Still stuck after all of that? Message us. We have talked hundreds of people through this, and the fix is usually faster than reading this post was.

Written by

Callum Reid · Support lead at CosyTelly

I'm Callum. I run support at CosyTelly, so if you've ever messaged us about a Firestick that won't sideload an app, or a picture that dropped five minutes before kick-off, there's a fair chance it was me on the other end. I've set this up… More about Callum