Being in the UK, my wife and I watch PBS and TNN24 daily. The service is terrific, apart from the fact they stop occasionally, despite having 45mb/s with BT infinity. The question is, would this be cured by switching to Virgin 200mb/s, or is the problem at the Thai end, or is it just the distance? Many thanks.

PBS and Channel 3 HD are reported in another thread of having issues here in Thailand and often bad signal from Thaicom5 so suspect that might be the issue you have and nothing to do with your internet service.

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/910143-problem-with-channel-3hd/#entry10636230

Not much you can do.

Distance as such is not a problem.

But with the limited bandwidth on international connections your problems with streams from Thailand will not be solved by an even faster package in the UK.

You experience these problems simply the other way round.

Usually the forum is full of complaints watching streams from UK or elsewhere in Thailand.

Such a stream is usually less then 2 Mbit/s.

In higher qualities maybe 3 Mbit/s.

Far from your package bandwidth.

Does the site(s) offer the possibility to switch to lower quality (bandwidth)?

Can you provide the link here?

Thank you for your replies. -That'll save me a bit of money. KhunBENQ we watch at .tnnthailand.com/player.php and .program.thaipbs.or.th/live. I especially like Thai PBS, informative and well made progammes. TNN24 keeps us up to date with all Thai news.

In that case PBS would appear to be located in Thailand and there almost never is enough international bandwidth for good internet streaming - normal to have uploads at about 10% of downloads and even downloads here are greatly limited due to lack of international routes. And these are not high income stations that can pay for more. TNN is a .com but probably is also here and subject to the same bandwidth issues.

I just tried:

http://www.tnnthailand.com/player.php

from within Thailand.

I have a speedmeter running and see that the bandwidth requirements are even less than I estimated.

They have three different qualities to select from:

"hd"

"hi"

"low"

Even "hd" does not require more than 1(!) Mbit/s on average.

"hi" is still an acceptable quality for a news channel.

Subtitles/inserts are still well readable.

"low" is a bit blurry, tone is still OK but the text inserts/subtitles are "on the edge".

Fiddle around (select "hi') and see whether it helps.

TNN is a .com but probably is also here and subject to the same bandwidth issues.

Very likely.

There is an address requested to play the stream: 203.150.19.173.

And that belongs to "Internet Thailand Company Limited" located in Bangkok.