Internet Viewing Picture Quality: Some common reasons for poor picture quality

 Issue

Solution

The upload speed of the Internet connection in your home may be insufficient to host your Slingbox.

Contact your Internet service provider (ISP) to see what options you have for upgrading your Internet service. To use a Slingbox, your home Internet requires a minimum upload speed of 600 Kbps. The faster the upload speed, the better the quality of the picture when you are away from home.

The download speed in your remote location may be too slow for a good stream from the Slingbox.

Not much you can do here other than try changing locations. Or, if you're in a hotel, you might try waiting until the non-peak Internet traffic times (early in the morning and late at night).

You may be streaming through a virtual private network (VPN) or though a proxy server.

If you are connected to a VPN, all of your network traffic is redirected through that VPN connection, potentially causing slowdowns. Some VPN client software allows you to limit the network traffic that goes through the VPN server; you can restrict it to only the data involved when you're requesting data or services from behind your corporate firewall. Contact your local network administrator for help doing this.

Your computer may be downloading something in the background while you're streaming.

Check your browser's download manager. You can either wait for it to complete, or stop the download.

If you're streaming on a Wi-Fi network, you may have a weak signal.

Look at the signal strength of your connection to your Wi-Fi hotspot. Move closer to the source if it's weak.

If you're streaming from outside of your home network, others at home may be taking up network capacity.

Someone at home may be doing something that is affecting your home network temporarily. You can wait and try again later, or call someone at home to see what's going on.