Problem with new router and hi-res files. HELP, please.

You answered your own question.

The music starts so there is not a 'network issue' persay, what you have is the cheapest possible hardware as supplied by your ISP, its never going to be a great experience. Vodafone arn't even a particularly mainstream broadband provider so they are probably just happy to get customers on board.

First thing would be to check with vodafone that you can use your won router. Then purchase a decent router.

Routers are like graphics cards. People think that as long as they have one it will all be awesome. Thing is do you want to play Pong or Far Cry 4?

Buffering hi-res audio is indicative of the Vodafone not able to handle the traffic density.  This is typical of low cost ISP routers, but not all I hasten to add. Especially so as the old one was OK, new one not.

The cheapest (& best solution no matter what router you have) is to fit a LAN switch between ND5 & NAS & branch off that to the Vodafone to handle the low density iRadio & streamer traffic. 

A switch sends & receives only to the correct addresses & it does it all simultaneously,  unlike a typical wireless hub that pebble dashes the whole network with everything, but does not send & receive simultaneously.

Netgear GS105 or similar @ £15-£20  plus a length of Cat5e or Cat6 from switch to router. 

Sounds like a good solution.

Thanks Mike. 

Mike, Bela Logosi, I very much doubt the vodaphone broadband router has hub ports .. These are very rare and specialised these days and not cheap consumer products. It will almost certainly have switch ports, which however, might be software controlled and as you say can't keep up. For now the best solution will be as you say to get a seperate cheap basic 'proxy' switch with hardware switching to bypass the possible software implemented switching in the ISP broadband router.

HOWEVER I am concerned such a poorly functioning broadband router will get in the way of web streaming applications.

id complain to the ISP, and say you want a refund or cancellation unless they give you a broadband router fit for purpose. Quite disgraceful.

Some consumer/retail ISP bundled broadband router are surprisingly capable and advanced devices, even though the ISP sometimes limits the features the user can change to reduce support demands, but a recent work project was quite an eye opener in this regard. So there is no excuse an ISP offering a lousy bundled router these days.

Simon

Hi Simon, 

problem is fixed. I called my ISP; three times, and finally I found the right person on the other side of the phone, the one that understood me, and just activated something inside the router. Now it works perfectly, even better than the old one. 

Thanks for your time.  

Vte

Vte, glad you have it working. Not convinced what they have told you is what has made the difference however. UPnP is a protocol often used by routers to open ports and service discovery..  and not really anything to do with internal music media streaming in that regard.. Anyway what ever they have done .. It works for you now

Simon, many router firewalls are now seem to be supplied with the ports for UPnP closed, even for internal traffic.  However, the SPI firewalls seem to have rules that allow them to be opened dynamically when the endpoints are identified as internal.  Hence anything which loads the routers processor will interrupt 'real(ish) time' UPnP traffic.  I believe this particularly tends to apply to traffic on the WiFi connection.

I believe setting UPnP to enabled will open these ports statically for internal traffic (not sure about external traffic though).  This was part of the firewall rules fix for my router.

I did ensure that everything external is blocked by the NAT rules though!