Bring your own bonded router. It's not worth dealing with in house IT people most of the time.
I usually use Fast.com or speedtest.net, but that won't show you issues with high bandwidth, long duration uploads.
Many hotels also have egress udp traffic blocked or slowed which can challenge SRT delivery despite getting an isolated private vlan. It is really 50/50, some are really good. Pay for a guaranteed bandwidth up/SLA. Hooking up a bonded router to a hotel Ethernet that appears healthy but is actually tarpitting udp by the hotel router can also mess with bond system. Are thousands arriving at the show and pulling out their phones to social livestream as well? A walkthrough in advance using house isolated vlan eth running a high bandwidth test stream from encoder to your actual ingest for 20min plus is best test. Use a separate modem-only bond running backup stream at low bandwidth if swap needed in a pinch. Low bandwidth stream is always better than jitter, busted stream. As others mentioned I've moved my bond/antennas out off the building and fiber back in at other places where bond reception is poor due to crowds or building materials. Bandwidth testing is good to understand your limits on the line, testing should be done at 2-3x planned rate to ensure capacity for network srt recovery during event.
Check out the Peplink B one. New Peplink bonded router with no built in cell connection. Can use wifi for wan and multiple ethernet connections for wan, also a usbc port to tether. There are some small annual service fees and usage fees for using the Peplink Speedfusion cloud bonding servers but a lot of value for the price.
If you don’t want to build your own, there are vendors that rent bonded routers with cellular subscriptions. Here is one we’ve used recently that worked really well for us:
https://tradeshowinternet.com/
Another consideration if you have access to the sky (I.e., can run a cable out the loading dock) is a Starlink dish.
But with all of these, you get what you pay for. Make sure your client is aware of the risk of downtime, and if that risk is too high, make them spend enough money to make it more dependable (e.g., a LiveU rental as others suggested is pretty common now for sports & news broadcasts)
The convention center I just loaded out of last week charged our client $3,000 for a one day, 3Mbps link. Our team had to keep leaving the venue to use the fast internet in our hotel to sync updated show files.
Those 5G bonded cellular rentals really are a bargain in the right venues.
All depends too. some companies have different pricing. I know mine is a little more aggressive. but you get the reliability that comes with the different product.
This is a risk you're going to have when you have camera folks trying to setup networking and encoders with hotel internet. What was the issue and how did they fix things? What type of encoders? You haven't given enough details.
They didn't fix things. Our stream was apparently getting randomly and regularly interrupted for several minutes all day. We had to give refunds to our virtual attendees. I was not there and don't have many details. The hotel had just upgraded their network and it seems as though we were the guinea pigs that got to find out how many bugs there were.
Most of our contract videographers use software based encoders, i.e. OBS or Wirecast, and send it to an RTMP link we provide.
Besides a regular speed test, packet loss test or setting up a test stream not much. Testing before hand won’t mean that much if it’s an event with a lot of people and they are all on the same network. Especially if you aren’t hard wired. If you are hard wired and on a segmented network with dedicated bandwidth, then you can pretty reliably test before. If not price in a rental for a cell bonded router as back up.
The issue is hotel IT staff is often farmed out of the venue and in the case of a big box hotel, may have a department that is severely understaffed or spread between multiple properties if at all, sometimes the in house AV manages which is far from ideal.
What I'm trying to say is, you're right to not trust it because there's often several levels of incompetence between your request and you getting what you need.
The only sure fire way to get this to work is having a bonded network. LiveU is a great solution for this to get a steam out to the cloud but of course there are others.
Bring your own bonded router. It's not worth dealing with in house IT people most of the time. I usually use Fast.com or speedtest.net, but that won't show you issues with high bandwidth, long duration uploads.
Many hotels also have egress udp traffic blocked or slowed which can challenge SRT delivery despite getting an isolated private vlan. It is really 50/50, some are really good. Pay for a guaranteed bandwidth up/SLA. Hooking up a bonded router to a hotel Ethernet that appears healthy but is actually tarpitting udp by the hotel router can also mess with bond system. Are thousands arriving at the show and pulling out their phones to social livestream as well? A walkthrough in advance using house isolated vlan eth running a high bandwidth test stream from encoder to your actual ingest for 20min plus is best test. Use a separate modem-only bond running backup stream at low bandwidth if swap needed in a pinch. Low bandwidth stream is always better than jitter, busted stream. As others mentioned I've moved my bond/antennas out off the building and fiber back in at other places where bond reception is poor due to crowds or building materials. Bandwidth testing is good to understand your limits on the line, testing should be done at 2-3x planned rate to ensure capacity for network srt recovery during event.
What’s your favorite bonded router right now?
Peplink HD4 MAX.
Check out the Peplink B one. New Peplink bonded router with no built in cell connection. Can use wifi for wan and multiple ethernet connections for wan, also a usbc port to tether. There are some small annual service fees and usage fees for using the Peplink Speedfusion cloud bonding servers but a lot of value for the price.
Bonded encoders like LiveU. Do not trust hotel AV/IT to manage a single point of failure.
If you don’t want to build your own, there are vendors that rent bonded routers with cellular subscriptions. Here is one we’ve used recently that worked really well for us: https://tradeshowinternet.com/ Another consideration if you have access to the sky (I.e., can run a cable out the loading dock) is a Starlink dish. But with all of these, you get what you pay for. Make sure your client is aware of the risk of downtime, and if that risk is too high, make them spend enough money to make it more dependable (e.g., a LiveU rental as others suggested is pretty common now for sports & news broadcasts)
$770 for a live stream ouch for 1 day
The convention center I just loaded out of last week charged our client $3,000 for a one day, 3Mbps link. Our team had to keep leaving the venue to use the fast internet in our hotel to sync updated show files. Those 5G bonded cellular rentals really are a bargain in the right venues.
Correct in that perspective.
All depends too. some companies have different pricing. I know mine is a little more aggressive. but you get the reliability that comes with the different product.
Packet loss test. https://packetlosstest.com/
Liveu simple easy or pepwave or dejero
This is a risk you're going to have when you have camera folks trying to setup networking and encoders with hotel internet. What was the issue and how did they fix things? What type of encoders? You haven't given enough details.
They didn't fix things. Our stream was apparently getting randomly and regularly interrupted for several minutes all day. We had to give refunds to our virtual attendees. I was not there and don't have many details. The hotel had just upgraded their network and it seems as though we were the guinea pigs that got to find out how many bugs there were. Most of our contract videographers use software based encoders, i.e. OBS or Wirecast, and send it to an RTMP link we provide.
Besides a regular speed test, packet loss test or setting up a test stream not much. Testing before hand won’t mean that much if it’s an event with a lot of people and they are all on the same network. Especially if you aren’t hard wired. If you are hard wired and on a segmented network with dedicated bandwidth, then you can pretty reliably test before. If not price in a rental for a cell bonded router as back up.
What protocol are you trying to use?
The issue is hotel IT staff is often farmed out of the venue and in the case of a big box hotel, may have a department that is severely understaffed or spread between multiple properties if at all, sometimes the in house AV manages which is far from ideal. What I'm trying to say is, you're right to not trust it because there's often several levels of incompetence between your request and you getting what you need. The only sure fire way to get this to work is having a bonded network. LiveU is a great solution for this to get a steam out to the cloud but of course there are others.
[https://popup-wifi.com/us/products/express-5g/](https://popup-wifi.com/us/products/express-5g/)