My cable provider has an app that lets me stream live tv but I have to be connected to the home network and it restricts the app when it detects a different IP address and DNs. I set up an OpenVPN server on my Asus home router and set up the client vpn on another Asus router at a different house. I connect a roku to the vpn client router and can access the app and watch live tv at the other house. The quality is good sometimes as I’ve gotten full hd picture even though the home bandwidth upload is only 5mbps but the connection seems unstable. Sometimes I’ll get a full hd picture but it randomly degrades and sometimes the app just craps out and throws errors and it seems to be related to the connection speed.
I set up an OpenVPN server with a raspberry pi 3 b+ and connected it to the home router via Ethernet and I plan to see if this will improve stability. The raspberry pi 3 b+ apparently has a better processor than the home router processor. Will this make any difference?
Or does spotty connection stability have more to do with the roku wifi connection to the vpn client router? Would stability be more consistent if I got a roku ultra and connected it to the vpn client router with an Ethernet cable instead of using wifi?
Could be the wifi, but more than likely the issue is the VPN. OpenVPN is not known for great performance, and home routers are not good at sustained throughput over OpenVPN. You’re on the right track trying different hardware.
You could use the IPSec Protocol. Your Asus router should support this. It’s much faster and doesn’t need that much CPU power. I’ve used it with my Asus router set up and it works great.
I finally got a chance to test it out and the connections seems to be more stable. I still get random picture quality degrading but it’s not as bad as the random app / time out errors and the full hd picture seems more consistent than before.
By peering, do you mean the download/upload bandwidth? If so, it seems pretty good. I thought the home internet plan only had 5mbps upload but I was getting ~11mbps upload when running speed test from the rasberry pi and ~100-120mbps download. The download speed seems more variable where sometimes I’ll get 100+ mbps download but it’ll go down to 60-70mbps sometimes which still isn’t too bad I guess. The upload is pretty consistent at ~11-12 mbps. So I’m pretty sure the home internet plan is 100/10 mbps.
When I run speedtest from the client, I get around 7-10 mbps download and ~11-12 mbps upload. I connected to the client router with a laptop and ran a ping on the VPN server and got around 30-40ms ping. I’m not sure how to do a speedtest directly between the client server.
Do you think a Roku ultra with a wired ethernet connection to the client router will make the picture quality full hd picture quality even more consistent?
Peering is all of the pipes between one location and another that aren’t owned by either locations’ ISP. It’s a little more complicated than that but not significantly or in any important way. You can’t fix bad peering; everyone will blame the other side and the people who can do something about it already know. You can test for bad peering with iperf and MTR.
iperf is great for testing the speeds between two locations.
I wouldn’t worry about any of that though. Your upload is pretty low so lowering the quality is your only choice to improve quality.
QoS may or may not be helpful. It is set up on your router and each manufacturer does it differently and some don’t call it QoS.