Why would one choose another streaming speed? When is faster or slower better or worse?
How do I know if 1 MBS is the best? Should a faster or slower speed be set for a 4G LTE device vs wifi in a remote location?
The important question is what is the upload speed of your internet where the Tablo is hosted?
Two, what recording quality is your Tablo set to? 720p Roku, 720p, 1080p?
There are so many choices because it depends heavily on two things.
- What is the upload speed for your home internet?
- What is the download speed for your remote device at the time you are using it?
If you are using celluar data, either 3G or LTE, then 1 Mbps is likely best. 2 Mpbs may be fine on LTE.
If you are using good remote wifi (like at a friend’s house or your business) and you have upload speeds of at least 5 Mpbs, then you likely can do higher speeds.
The ultimate is to use “Full quality”. That setting makes your remote device act just like a local device with no additional tuner and no additional transcoding. Once I get Google fiber (maybe this year if I am really lucky), I can try out that setting. Even though I have 7.5 Mbps upload speeds, I still can’t do full quality, but a lot of that is because I am using 1080p recording on my Tablo.
There are some bugs in Tablo Connect. 56K is not “audio only” and it isn’t 56K. It may be the same as 2 Mbps (it definitely is higher than 750k). 3 Mbps and 4 Mbps will not do full screen for some reason. Your device will have extra black bars on the screen at those settings.
The good thing is that this is the only Tablo setting that is device specific (all the rest affect all Tablo clients). So try out a speed and see how it works. If the speed is set too high, it will show a few seconds of a show, buffer for a little bit, show a little more, buffer some more, and so on. You will know right away if a setting isn’t good for you.
Another consideration I would add is mobile data caps. A good ISP upload speed and LTE could support multiple mb/sec…but if your mobile plan has a datacap or you pay according to bandwidth used (such as TING), you’ll likely want to set it lower to avoid overage charges or unnecessary bandwidth charges.
So, as the others said…there is a long list of considerations to take into accoun when choosing your quality setting.
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Due to excellent home upload speed and LTE mobile service I could get by with higher rates but 1MBS is good enough quality for my needs.
What I consider moderate mobile Tablo viewing consumes between 10-20GB data/month. Probably a major bummer for tiered data plan users.
T-mobile does a pretty good job to minimize throttling “unlimited plans” except in extreme situations with concentrated number of users.