A JitterWorks colleague recently joined the growing millions who decided to ditch the high cost of cable and satellite television, cut the cord, and sign up for streaming services.

Have you joined the movement? Of course this requires relying one-hundred percent on your Internet connection. In a blog we posted this past March titled “Balancing Act”  we wrote: “On the flip side, subscription streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and HBO+ are booming. The primary reason for the overwhelming popularity is the rapid advancements in network technologies.”

Network technologies continue to improve, making the streaming experience a viable and cost effective alternative to the more traditional ways of watching your favorite television shows.

There are still many hurdles, not the least of which is knowing – not guessing – if your current Internet service is up to the task. For instance, does your ISP offer unlimited data or is there a monthly cap? This is a very important question. Streaming movies and television chews up a lot of data.

Many ISPs will cap your data at one terabyte. That’s a one with twelve zeros. It seems impossible to reach that point in thirty-one days. If you’re a family with multiple streaming devices going at the same time; If you like to watch television in 4K high definition; If you use voice and video to communicate, you can easily reach and exceed that number.

We often preach about “knowing your network.” More specifically, knowing your network performance. We refer to this as LOTUS. When it comes to streaming movies and live television, tracking and trending your network’s LOTUS is very important.

Most ISPs pride themselves on providing more than enough bandwidth. And they do. What is equally, if not more important, is the L – Latency. In an early blog titled “How Jitter Works” we wrote: “Internet Service Providers sell you on their services based on how much bandwidth they can provide. Everybody identifies bandwidth with speed. We’ll get more into bandwidth in future blogs. It is very important. But when you are considering network and Internet speed, what you should be more concerned with is latency.”

If you are streaming a TV show or movie, and all of a sudden the program pauses and you see that little white circle going round and round, that is a latency issue. Data is not being transmitted fast enough to keep up. This may be due to a problem on the streaming service side, or a latency and jitter issue with your Internet service. There are ways to determine this.

Monitoring your network performance is the best way for you to know if this is something your ISP needs to address, or if it’s something you’ll need to live with because the problem is with the streaming service.

If you have or are thinking about cutting the cord, you might be very interested in reading some of our first blogs. You can find them in our blog archive.