trouble with Netflix playing in windows....

[matthias.huber]

hello
i hope someone can help me here
i switched to sonic a few months ago, all good, nice speed, etc etc
then we experienced that on a windows machine (win7, laptop and desktop) about after 5 minutes of playback (the time can vary), netflix shows a "0% spinning circle" and only a browser window/tab reload gets this unstuck.
playback does not stall on my iPhone or iPad, but seems to restart as the image quality goes bad (and recovers) in a similar pattern.

i have called netflix and they have said it is a connectivity issue, i called sonic, and a nice gentlemen tried to troubleshoot it but could not diagnose the issue, he set the modem to a better protocol, but the issue is still at hand.

does anyone have a similar problem?

i have exluded the faults of the router (used 2 different kind) and wifi (used network cable), issue still here.

it seems that something is happening about every 5 minutes that causes netflix to loose its stream, but all other playback/streaming (hulu, spotify) are not affected by this

i am at my wits end for now

thank you

[dane]

Sounds like the DHCP lease timeout interval. Do you have a firewall on your router? If so, disable that and see if the issue goes away.

We've seen some poor firewalls which will not accept the DHCP lease renewal.

[matthias.huber]

hello,
thank you for the fast reply,
I have a Cisco E3200 router with firewall enabled
with the DHCP timout, is this inside the firewall (set for 1 day expiration) or does this refer to the connection from router/modem to ISP?

[dane]

The issue we have seen is firewalls that wrongly reject the unicast lease renewal as some sort of unsolicited traffic. It's rather broken behavior. Try disabling the firewall, or contact Cisco support for assistance.

[matthias.huber]

hello again,
so i disabled the firewall and the behavior did not change, still got the stalling playback
how i can i narrow down that this is a) the router or b) the modem or c) something else ?

thank you

[matthias.huber]

found a new firmware for my router,
release note talk about something with unicast/multicast message,
will update and let you know.

m.

[dane]

Can you bypass the router and see if the trouble goes away, directly connecting a PC with Ethernet to the modem to see if things work in that configuration?

This would help point toward the connection, or the router as being the source of trouble.

[melentiev]

Hi Matthias,

I have had the EXACT issue as you described. As Dane mentioned the problem might be with your router firewall/SPI.

The problem: ISP is providing 5 min lease time on WAN IP, lease is expiring causing the connection to drop momentarily until the lease is renewed. The lease is supposed to be renewed by a UDP request from the client at 50% of the lease time but responses from server are being blocked by the SPI firewall. They are being blocked because the response comes from a different address than the request was sent to (hence a loss of connection state and failure to pass the firewall).

If you have any kind of control over your router to customize the firewall, the solution would be to add a rule that allows the reply from the DHCP server. The rule could look something like this:

iptables -I INPUT -p udp --sport 67 --dport 68 -j ACCEPT

It certainly helped me. Hope your issue gets resolved.

Cheers.

P.S. You mentioned you used two different kinds of routers; do you have any other modems to try? For example before even finding the solution, I would hook my older SpeedStream 4100 modem and the problem would go away instantly, which led me to believe that Sonic's ZTE modem might just have to do something with this in certain situations.

hello
i hope someone can help me here
i switched to sonic a few months ago, all good, nice speed, etc etc
then we experienced that on a windows machine (win7, laptop and desktop) about after 5 minutes of playback (the time can vary), netflix shows a "0% spinning circle" and only a browser window/tab reload gets this unstuck.