In this morning’s service a few people noticed that their connection was having to buffer more than usual, and that the quality of the video and audio kept fluctuating. This blog post takes a quick look at what happened, why it happened, and what we’re doing to fix it.
What happened?
The internet connection to the church wasn’t capable of sustaining the speeds needed for smooth streaming of video. This meant that people watching would see the video stutter or sometimes pause entirely.
Why did this happen?
We’re not sure. The path to get an internet connection into the church is a relatively complex one compared to what you might have at home, involving several points where things might slow down. We weren’t able to quickly identify what was wrong during the service.
What are we doing to fix it?
There are two problems we’re fixing:
Making sure we can stream services
We’re reducing the threshold at which we decide to use a backup mobile connection to stream services. It’s difficult to change our connection mid-service (although we can in an emergency), so for the time being we’ll be using our backup connection unless we’re absolutely certain our main one is behaving as expected.
Making sure the internet connection to the church is stable
We’ve put some extra monitoring in place to see if we can narrow down which bit of the chain is at fault and then investigate further, but since the problem doesn’t appear all the time it might take us a few weeks before we’re able to properly identify it.
Depending on where the problem lies the solution could be as simple as a quick configuration change, might need replacement hardware for our network, or might need us to involve our connection provider.