B116 overseas roaming

I’m probably doing some thing wrong here but would welcome and assistance ?

I live in australia and have used ARC since the start. It improves with each update. Have come to the uk for a couple of weeks. ARC works fine on wifi but mobile roaming doesn’t work at all. I’ve got full data roaming good 4g signal and plenty of headroom on my mobile plan.

Using car play by the way .

Cheers

Nick

I have found the same. My opinion is that this is caused by Roon’s current extreme need for system resources and bandwidth and that’s before even playing any music.

There’s a whole thread about it on here which got sidetracked into someone being told to hard wire his computer into the LAN, which while does workaround the problem absolutely does not fix the issue. My server is in New Zealand and I have been in South America for 3 months and have found the same issue. Great internet here, but even on Wifi in my house it is challenging. Plex on the other hand - perfect other than the obvious (it’s a little slower to load - but you expect that).

My recollection of England was that internet to AUS / NZ was somewhat constrained, but that was many many years ago and it has probably improved. I should really have done a bandwidth test with iperf or something. But I fly out tomorrow. You might be able to do similar.

Do you use a VPN on the mobile? Whilst this usually works, I find that any issues can be solved by disconnecting the VPN or choosing a different server.

1 Like

For the regular LAN usage ok, but for ARC?

My guess is that ARC is where all these problems show up, because it’s more bandwidth and resource constrained, whereas local networks are more able to deal with larger amounts of traffic and cellular networks less so. I mean it still takes a long time to sort of sync up the recent played / added on the main screen without even playing any music. Something in the design / architecture is causing this as it doesn’t happen on similar applications. One possible reason is maybe Roon doesn’t send any information from an online cache / CDN and instead gets it straight from the individual server. Personally I like that, but it wouldn’t be as good as e.g. having all images cached and globally available in a nearby CDN to your country. I don’t know, I’m just guessing here. I know Plex puts a lot in the cloud because the local server (used to) stop being accessible even locally when the internet was down which was really annoying!

Maybe some things in ARC are not very efficient (though for me the syncing only take a few seconds), but “extreme need for system resources and bandwidth” is quite an exaggeration. Most importantly, ARC has none of the close-to-real-time streaming requirements of local RAAT.

As for caching, I would love if it did more art caching locally on the phone, if the phone has no network it does not matter how far the CDN is. It’s not great how artwork degrades or even disappears then - strangely even for downloads where the art is embedded in my files

Well it’s just my opinion, you are welcome to disagree. But unless it’s super buggy code (and I think roonlabs are better than that), then something is requiring more resources of some kind than what the device is able to product in a timely manner. You can see this because every time I use the app it is laggy in a connection way. It used to be laggy in a UI way too, but I think that has been improved quite a bit since the early days. I too think the sync audio speed is OK (if that is what you meant), but there are still issues of a latency type when browsing stuff in the app. And sometimes that makes it crash. I haven’t been home and local to the server for three months, so I can’t say if these issues are only remote or still both remote and local, all I can say is that when I got to South America the experience was far worse but also that it has improved with the various updates, just not improved enough yet to be 100% perfect experience.

What format are you and the OP streaming? That would be a useful metric. And is it a streaming service or from your Core?

Primarily the issues I speak of are before playing any music. Music plays fine when it doesn’t crash which it does do more often while overseas. But before even getting to that it’s slow and laggy, though less so than it was. However I do need to be careful here as the original posters issue is what is important and I don’t mean to hijack that too far sideways.

Given the distance this could be a peering issue with the ISPs. Also with the distance there would be an increase in latency that could cause issues with hi resolution streaming. Perhaps Arc isn’t able to optimize for the increased latency.

I was active with ARC whilst in the UK over the Christmas period, on WiFi but also roaming with Vodafone on 4G networks.
Access to my Roon Core back in Ireland was fine and served me, all content at the ‘Original Format’ level for all formats, including some 24/96 and 24/192.
I even downloaded albums, while still listening, while sat on a plane, pre-takeoff, so I could continue to listen in off-line mode.

1 Like

Risky given ARCS painfully slow process.

No, an album download (24/44.1) completed between taking seat, IEMs in, selecting the album and the instruction to set into Flight safe mode.

Thanks for the comments. It works perfectly whilst on wi fi. When using mobile I can sign into my nucleus but that’s where it stops. It says that it cannot connect to the core, which is odd as it’s signed into my nucleus.

Baffled

Perhaps your carrier is blocking it. Can you use other streaming services ok?

That’s more of a bandwidth scenario than a latency scenario. I’ve never noticed any issues with bandwidth, but latency a lot.

No, not at all, just no sorry. EDIT - Sorry I see now you’re replying to a different comment, I take it back! :smiley: