I have a fast internet connection but FulGaz still won't stream

 

 

When you signed up for your internet connection you may have noticed an advertised speed. The real speed of your internet connection at the time and place where you train may be substantially lower. While the connection to the house may be fast, the wifi signal to the place you train may be very week, or increasingly, other people in your home may be streaming video themselves or using file syncing services such as dropbox.

 

To separate advertised speeds from your real speed, it's a good idea to download the "speed test" app and see what the actual download speed is in the place where you train. Again the time of day can play a big part in this speed reading, not just because of usage in your home, but in the buildings around you.

 

 

Streaming websites usually use a technology called "Adaptive bitrate streaming" This chops each video into sections a few seconds long, then delivers video at the best resolution it can for each section, depending on your internet speed. Even if you specify 4K, it may end up sending a much lower resolution at times if your internet connection can't cope. It's the reason why Netflix etc can look very pixelated at times. Because the speed of the FulGaz video is varying every second based on your power output, adaptive bitrate streaming doesn't work because each new section attempts to start at the real time, not the FulGaz time (faster or slower than real time).

 

If you download the videos first, FulGaz can work without any internet connection at all, but if you're streaming, it needs more bandwidth that Zwift (which does not work at all without Internet). The reason for this is the images in Zwift are 3D computer graphics, generated on the device you're using, it needs the internet to send and receive data about you and the other riders. This is less than the bandwidth needed for high quality video.