Rogers and Twitch.tv - Seeking an official response

[dtx1]

Hello,

First and foremost, mods, please don't merge this post with the "Throttling RTMP" thread. That thread has gone unanswered long enough (10+ pages) and this issue needs to be addressed by a Rogers employee. Believe me, I am not trying to be passive aggressive, but whats the point of telling people to reach out to the community forums if posts with effort put into them are just buried into inactive posts?

My problem can be best described as follows:

I am unable to maintain a consistent upload bitrate stream to Twitch (i.e. I am the broadcaster, not to be confused with tuning into Twitch streams). I struggle to maintain even a 5k upload bitrate to Twitch on a 150/15 plan.

Many other community members have been suffering the same issues.

DSLReports members reporting the same thing (many other threads like it).

Here is a fairly large Twitch streamer who also suffers from the same issues on the Rogers network.

I believe I have ruled out any hardware related issues because

• I have swapped out my modem twice (CGN2 -> CGN3ACSMR -> CGNM-3552, so unless they're all busted, I've done my due diligence)
• I have tried the same settings on another computer
• I have tried different versions of OBS, the logs all explicitly state that the frames are dropped solely due to connection issues (as opposed to skipped frames, which are caused by insufficient processing power)
• I have tried directly connecting my machines to both the modem in default gateway mode, as well as an Archer C7 into the bridged modem
• Most importantly, streaming to YouTube and Facebook is flawless, i.e. I can hold an 8k upload bitrate to those platforms with zero problems for extended periods of time (which likely rules out any Puma6 related problems, as all three of the streaming platforms mentioned make use of RTMP)

This likely leaves two culprits (perhaps more, please feel free to leave any other ideas):

1. This is an issue with Rogers throttling Twitch ingest traffic, or there is a problem with the routing of Twitch ingest bound traffic
2. This is an issue on Twitch's end (Twitch ingest server problems are unheard of, and they have officially stated that there is no limit to reasonable bitrates to their ingest servers. Moreover, in the past, Rogers community members have found that the use of VPNs solved their problems completely, although it appears that Rogers has found a way to "fix" that

The farthest that talking to livechat has gotten me is a tech visit, but what's the point of the tech visit? My signals are well within spec. The tech is just going to tell me that my connection looks fine and it's on Twitch's end. Even if it is a case of throttling and/or routing issues, what is one customer complaint going to do when it's a problem of this magnitude?

All of my friends who are also Rogers customers are unable to stream to Twitch because of the issues mentioned. All of my friends using Bell have no problems streaming to Twitch.

Ever since Bell laid fibe in my neighbourhood, they've been sending reps door-to-door twice a month or so, and they offered 300/300 for 60 bucks (not permanently, the price skyrockets after a year as usual).

I know it's not sweat off anyone's backs if I switch, but I've been with Rogers for five years now, and was recently offered a seemingly good deal when I called to upgrade (I thought I could finally broadcast with 15Mb upload). Rogers has been excellent in every other regard, and I want to make this work. However, none of the technical support live chat people have any answers, the network engineer "signal testing" always comes up empty-handed, and now the last avenue I can try (the Community Forums) has no answers as well.

Is this just a case of employees not admitting that Rogers is throttling because it's downright illegal and a legal liability?

Hopefully this post isn't just slapped onto the other one. Despite all of the things I've tried, questions I've asked, and people I've reached out to, no one knows the cause and/or doesn't want to talk about it.

I'm all out of options and just want to reach out for help one last time.

Any ideas, suggestions to try, or help is greatly appreciated.

***Edited Labels***

[dtx1]

There is literally nothing you can do.

I've made numerous calls and tickets and there hasn't been any effort to resolve these issues. Tickets always turn up with "looks good on our end, send another ticket if you're still having issues". I've spoken with the tech support "supervisors" and they also say there's literally nothing they can do but send in tickets. There's a year old thread with 15+ pages and no one from Rogers has even tried to address this issue.

At this point in time (and probably for many years to come, given just how long this problem has been ignored), Rogers does not care about this issue at all. If you truly need to be able to stream, or need a stable, low latency connection for anything other than UDP, go with Bell, or any other ISPs that use Bell's infrastructure.

[Datalink]

You could also move to a TPIA, which might still use the Rogers network.  Only drawback is that you're limited in download/upload rates.  I remember seeing a post from another user who had switched from a TPIA to Rogers.  The comment went something along the lines of "there were't any issues with the TPIA when it came to streaming".  The differences will be in the modem, the routing into and out of the TPIA network and the peering arrangements that the TPIAs have with the other services.  So, food for thought .....

[CMcCann]

Has anyone gotten a solution or had contact with a employee that understood anything about twitch and your issue?

I can't stream on a schedule since I never know when my internet is going to be "okay" to handle it.
I've tried everything and annoyed countless employees.

[CaptChair]

Hey there!

So SLOBS does have logs. %appdata%\slobs-client\node-obs\logs

Also, regardless of provider, dropped frames will happen from time to time. At that %, it could be something as simple as a windows checking for something> please see my next post for some suggestions (NOTE: I do work at Rogers, but this is from my own personal experience as a streamer).

[CaptChair]

Not an official response, but employee who streams on twitch who would like to help.

What fixed my issues were doing the following:

DISABLE NAGLE'S ALGORITHM IN WINDOWS

Windows + R
Type Regedit
Navigate to:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces
Select the directory for the network interface that contains your ethrenet's IPV4 address
Create a new DWORD named TcpAckFrequency and set its value to 1
Create another new DWORD named TCPNoDelay and set its valued to 1
Create a 3rd DWORD named TcpDelAckTicks and set its value to 0

DISABLE NETWORK THROTTLING INDEX IN WINDOWS

Windows + R
Type Regedit
 Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile
look for a DWORD named NetworkThrottlingIndex. If it doesn't exist, create it.
Set the value of NetworkThrottlingIndex to ffffffff

Hope this helps people

[CMcCann]

Hi CaptChair,

Thanks a lot for your response. I have made the edits to the registry on my machine as you have outlined, but unfortunately it seems that they did improve the consistency of my output/upload connection when streaming. I've also noticed that there does not seem to be any notable pattern to the health of my connection (speaking specifically for streaming to Twitch) and is very sporadic. At times the connection is very stable in the morning on some days, and evening on other days; when I try to stream again at those times when I had been able to, I find that I am no longer able to due to very poor connection quality.

In addition to the changes and tweaks to the registry settings that you had suggested, would you know of any other way that could help, or ways to identify/diagnose the cause of this? I just wanted to communicate my frustration when facing such erratic and inconsistent behavior in my connection.

Thanks, CM

[CaptChair]

Dang my man. Was hoping it would work as well for me as others.

One thing I also noticed was I had a way better frequency of good connection when I had my ingest server to auto. Are you hard locked to a server? If not, add that into the mix.

Before the above and my success in staying connected, the way that worked best for me was having Torgaurd vpn up. It's not as bad as it seems.

Hopefully one of these will get you up and running.

I'm a customer care agent so normally deal in stuff outside of the technical realm, but am a tech enthusiast outside if my regular job. I will keep researching whatever I can to try to help.

Let me know if the server thing helps

[Konstantin · Accepted solution]

Hi

I know this is an old thread but I'd like to add my issue and resolution and hope it will help some one.

Issue, same as in this thread:

Been streaming to Twitch off and on for some time now and started noticing that my connection quality did not persist with many dropped frames (15-20% on average).

The issue I found was with Primary Rogers DNS which is not editable in XB6 box that I have. When I run DNS test on primary Rogers DNS (64.71.255.204) it was loosing 24% of requests, not sure why the modem didn't switch to secondary (could be a bug).

Fix:

Change primary/secondary DNS to something more reliable. If you're running your home set up with just Rogers modem and cannot change DNS IPs I suggest changing on PC/MAC that you are streaming from (Network setting).

There are many good alternate DNS servers with different intent and purposes you can use, do a little research on the net. After you find the one you think fits your needs you can further test selected DNS using tools like DNS Benchmark (free) and Quick Ping Monitor to find out quality (Loss Rate, RTT etc). Pick a few stable DNS IPs and test with Twitch to find out which is most stable.

After changing my primary/secondary DNS on my ASUS router I am 100% stream stable.

I hope this helps.

Cheers!