As you have probably seen, I’ve launched occasional Twitch streaming of my work activities, including schematic capture, PCB layout, library coding, firmware coding, and even some solder melting. It’s been a bit of a learning curve, but I’ve been traversing it fairly successfully, I think. However, one big problem that I was having was with the quality of my stream output.

Allow me to describe my home office and network infrastructure situation. We have Frontier FIOS internet, which is fiber optic to a junction box on your house, when then downconverts to RF over coax, like cable internet. Our modem and router live in our living room. The router is a cheap TP-Link flashed with DD-WRT. My shack/office is in a bedroom adjacent to the living room. Our house is early 70s vintage, so no network cabling was wired into the house. The old office network setup was another Linksys router flashed with DD-WRT configured as a wifi bridge, with all of the office devices connected to the bridge via Ethernet cable. In effect, nearly every device in the house was connected via wifi. Given the combination of the cheap router and wifi congestion, my internet speeds were slow. The internet package I had from Frontier was labeled at 25 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload, but I’d be lucky if I could get 5 Mbps each way from the office. This meant that the Twitch stream was being bandwidth-choked, since it needs about 2.8 Mbps upload on a consistent basis, which this setup couldn’t provide.

So in order to provide a better stream experience, I did a couple of things. First I called Frontier and got our internet service upgraded to 30 Mbps up/down for a slightly cheaper monthly rate than we currently pay (it pays to check on that every year or two). Then I ran an Ethernet cable installation from the living room near the router to the office so that I could toss out the wifi bridge.

Happily I can now report that from all of the office/shack PCs, I can easily get more than 30 Mbps upload and download speed. I also ran a Twitch streaming test last night from the office PC and got two hours of continuous streaming without a single frame being dropped, which is quite an improvement from the previous streams.

It’s been a few weeks since the last stream, but I’m ready to pick up the pace a bit more again. Watch for more streams soon.