taylorlewis•29d agoMost Upvoted

Took me 90 minutes to figure out why my show kept buffering, turned out to be a CAT5 cable from 2005

I was sitting there blaming Netflix and my ISP for three episodes of The Bear stuttering every 10 minutes, finally swapped out an old ethernet cable I found tangled behind the TV stand and the problem vanished instantly. Anyone else ever waste an afternoon on something this dumb with their streaming setup?

2 comments

2 Comments

angela4329d ago

Yeah but honestly that doesn't make sense to me because a cat5 cable from 2005 should still be fine for most streaming unless you're pushing 4k HDR or something. Netflix recommends 25mbps for 4k and cat5 can handle 100mbps easy, so unless the cable was physically broken or the connectors were corroded I don't see how just age would cause buffering. Plus a lot of people don't realize that wifi interference or router placement is usually the real culprit anyway. I've swapped cables before thinking it fixed things but it was actually just rebooting the router or resetting the connection that did it. Maybe you just jiggled something loose and it was really a different problem.

the_phoenix29d ago

You said 'unless the cable was physically broken or the connectors were corroded' and honestly that's the part I keep coming back to. @angela43 do you think most people actually check their connectors? I've seen cat5 plugs where the little plastic clip snapped off years ago and it's just held in by friction and hope. That can cause intermittent connection drops that feel like a speed issue but it's really just the cable barely making contact. Could be something as simple as that happening after years behind a desk.