It’s not your router or anything inside your house, it’s the copper network. Copper is shared with all your neighbors and that’s why your speed varies. Also with copper, your download speeds are 10x faster than your upload speed. Also copper is noisy. Get fiber if you can, you will get a clean, stable, and no dropouts. With 1G fiber, I get 980Mb up and down, if you get 100M fiber, you would get almost 100Mb up and down. Fiber is also cheap, I pay less than $50 a month for 1Gb fiber
Minimum Broadband Speed Necessary For Uninterrupted Qobuz and/or Tidal Listening?
I live in a sparsely populated rural area with only a few Internet providers. I currently have 25Mb DSL from CenturyLink (previously Sprint landline) and I subscribe to both Qobuz and Tidal. My actual DSL speed varies from about 18Mb up to 25Mb and this can vary during the day. My hardware includes a Bluesound Node 2i connected by a short Ethernet cable (Not using a wireless connection) to my CenturyLink DSL router.
I can rarely listen for more than 20 minutes or so without experiencing what I would deem dropouts in either the Qobuz or Tidal music stream, or the stream will simply freeze and I have to hit the “play” icon to re-start the music stream. I do seem to suffer a few more problems listening to Qobuz than Tidal, and I attribute this to Qobuz’s multiple higher resolution offerings (higher resolution than Redbook CD) vs, the MQA offerings from Tidal which I believe use a bit less bandwidth than Quobuz’s higher resolution offerings.
I recently started listening to the four lossless radio streams with MQA encoding now offered by Radio Paradise, and interestingly enough I DO NOT have these dropouts and/or music freezes with the Radio Paradise streams. And the MQA feeds from Radio Paradise are always glitch-free compared to Tidal and Qobuz.
These dropouts/freezes suggest my CenturyLink 25Mb DSL speed is not enough for either Qobuz and Tidal and that I need to purchase more bandwidth. 25Mb is CenturyLink’s maximum speed in my area, but I can get fibre connectivity in increments ranging from 45Mb up to 1Gb and cable connectivity in increments ranging from 50Mb up to 1,5Gb, and StarLink satellite service from Space X at 70Mb ($100/month, no data cap) plus $600 for satellite equipment is now available in my area.
I’m interested in your thoughts regarding the minimum broadband speed I need, and whether I should select cable or fibre to upgrade to?
I can rarely listen for more than 20 minutes or so without experiencing what I would deem dropouts in either the Qobuz or Tidal music stream, or the stream will simply freeze and I have to hit the “play” icon to re-start the music stream. I do seem to suffer a few more problems listening to Qobuz than Tidal, and I attribute this to Qobuz’s multiple higher resolution offerings (higher resolution than Redbook CD) vs, the MQA offerings from Tidal which I believe use a bit less bandwidth than Quobuz’s higher resolution offerings.
I recently started listening to the four lossless radio streams with MQA encoding now offered by Radio Paradise, and interestingly enough I DO NOT have these dropouts and/or music freezes with the Radio Paradise streams. And the MQA feeds from Radio Paradise are always glitch-free compared to Tidal and Qobuz.
These dropouts/freezes suggest my CenturyLink 25Mb DSL speed is not enough for either Qobuz and Tidal and that I need to purchase more bandwidth. 25Mb is CenturyLink’s maximum speed in my area, but I can get fibre connectivity in increments ranging from 45Mb up to 1Gb and cable connectivity in increments ranging from 50Mb up to 1,5Gb, and StarLink satellite service from Space X at 70Mb ($100/month, no data cap) plus $600 for satellite equipment is now available in my area.
I’m interested in your thoughts regarding the minimum broadband speed I need, and whether I should select cable or fibre to upgrade to?