Broadband

BBC engineers have used the lull after frenzied downloading and streaming of the Olympics to fix a bug with iPlayer that was causing BT Home Hubs and O2 and Be wireless routers to reset.

The annoying bug was believed to be a problem in the BBC’s encoding of the system that was affecting wireless routes using Thomson’s Speedtouch technology.

However, SamKnows can reveal the problems have also been felt at TalkTalk which uses Huawei wireless routers – different to the Speedtouch platform used by O2 and BT. Although the problems do not seem to have been as prevalent as at BT, TalkTalk has confirmed that it has had to respond to customer feedback and post a fix on its members web site.

“We’ve not been affected as much as BT would appear to be,” a spokesman told SamKnows.

“We have had some buffering issues and some restarting issues, but it’s mainly been problems with buffering. We’ve built a fix for it that can be downloaded from the members area on our service. We haven’t widely publicised it yet because it’s not been a problem for a lot of our customers.”

The BBC appears to have found the problem was in streaming code within Flash which it has fixed by ‘tweaking’ a setting in Adobe’s software. The corporation first fixed catch-up programming and radio before moving on to news.

BT’s only comment on the issue has been that only a tiny minority of its subscribers was ever affected and that the issues would appear to now to be resolved. Its new, black Home Hub was not affected by the problems.

It is not clear whether the BBC issues were linked with an upgrade of iPlayer which was being planned before the Olympics to ensure events could be made available to be streamed and downloaded shortly after they took place. Before the Olympics, sporting events would normally take at least as long as the event lasted to be encoded and the process could only begin once the action had finished. The BBC realised this needed to be improved for the Beijing games.

The iPlayer service is due to be improved further this month by some shows not being ‘killed’ after seven days. Several top shows, including the new Tess of the D’Urbervilles drama, will be kept live on the service so viewers can catch up with an entire series.

Tags: BBC, Be, BT, Huawei, iplayer, O2, Speedtouch, TalkTalk