Not here in my neck of the woods in east Tennessee.
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I have the same service with ipvanish and 95% of the time it works great. Hick ups I’ve had are usually resolved by resettling equipment or filing a ticket and it’s fixed. Might be your vpn that’s causing your issues.
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Have you gone back to the IPTV provider and requested a different URL? A different URL with IPTV smarter pro made a big difference with buffering.
I don’t know where you live or which Spectrum service you are using. But my friend in central Florida has Spectrum and it works well and they have modems/wireless routers at no additional cost.
Buffering is a tricky one to diagnose Technically, you only need about 5-7 mbps to stream on IPTV. We all have gotten into the more is better brain funk mode. If you are trying to download 4k movies then a little more speed would be better. If you are getting 400mbps after going through your VPN - your VPN is not the issue. With 1 small exception. My friend has tried to use the servers in Atlanta. GA from Surfshark and can not stream anything from his IPTV service. He had the same problem with Nord. Everything else works just not IPTV. So apparently some servers have the ability to restrict what you can connect to. I know he uses Charlotte, Tampa, Orlando and Miami with no issues other than what I list below.
I know of people who use an IPTV service that while having 18,000 streams (so they claim) it has buffering problems at various times and on various channels. The easiest way to prove if the buffering is coming from your VPN or from the IPTV service is to try watching Cinema2.4 or some other streaming service such as Netflix, Peacock, or any of the Prime movies on a firestick. You will probably find the other streaming services work well it is just your IPTV service. You can try to work with their service department but my friend has found they really do not want to be bothered by pesky things like customers. They either will not read your text describing in detail what the problem is exactly or they will give you the same old suggestions that they have been told to cut and paste into you reply. These people really should not be working in the customer service field. Neither will fix the problem. They make their money by selling more subscriptions than they can actually provide good coverage to. Who are you going to complain to?
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You’re right. After going through my post, I did mistakenly mix in some of spectrum’s tv habits (of charging remote control fees} when I should have stayed focused on the internet side.
You’re right, spectrum does provide the modem/router for free, as long as you’re an active sub. They do, however, charge you a $5 wifi monthly fee to enable the wifi component of their router. At least they do in Ohio.
That they do $5 bucks a month for internet connection. I pay a total of $44.99 for 500+Mbps speed, unlimited data and the use of their modem and router.
That’s a great price. Is that a promo pricing, I’m guessing? Spectrum just had another price increase year again to all their internet packages - another $5 bump.
I always wrestle with a new promo discount with spectrum every year. They’re a bit greedier with their retention offers than Time Warner was prior to Spectrum (Charter). Best I can ever get from them is $49 for 300+ mbps.
I use my own modem and router. No other Spectrum services.
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Nope that is what it is. I did sign up for their senior discount or whatever they called it and that knocked off $30 bucks. I believe all the major internet companies offer that. It’s some sort of a government program. Anyway. I pay $44.99 every month.
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Assuming your download speeds are not a problem and your IPTV service provider is up to snuff, I had my buffering and disconnection issues literally disappear by disabling IPV6 on my router. (I believe Surfshark Support recommends this at the first sign of trouble.) I am using a BuzzTV box which is probably pretty similar to the formulerz11 box. I also changed DHCP to Static and changed my ISP DNS settings to a set Surfshark recommended, but I am not necessarily convinced this was the real solution. In any case it does no harm.
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@Powerfader, Senior discount?!?! 
I’ve never heard of that! It was never offered. Thanks. I’m going to start chatting with them right now!
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Can’t remember exactly what it was call. The kept sending notifications about it. I know it is based on income. So, I didn’t think I would qualify, but I submitted what they asked for and got the discount. Tbh, I think since this is subsidized by the government. They don’t really give a hoot and just push the paper forward.
Yeah, that was it. Here is the exact link. just fill it out. It only took me a couple of minutes and they pushed me through. $30 bucks is $30 bucks!
I am on Spectrum and use SS . I don’t get any buffering . I checked my speed without the vpn running it says download speed 520 bps with vpn running it shows 115 to 120 most of the time.
I use tivimate among other apps some are free some i pay for. I don’t have any problems and I watch a lot of tv.
I must be very lucky i guess…
Thanks for the info. Do ya believe it? Yesterday afternoon, not long after reading your reply to me, honestly, Spectrum had an area-wide service outage. It lasted until this morning. I would have been upset, had it not been Monday night. The night I watch TV the least. Thanks again.
If you qualified for the $30 rebate from the ACP plan, then you can likely get upgraded to the improved dispersement amount of $75.
I live in the hills of NE Tennessee and we aren’t in a high-cost area.
"This comes as Congress has directed the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in partnership with the FCC to identify high-cost areas that would be eligible for the new program.
At this time, we do not know what areas will qualify,"
Bummer. Well, keep an eye on it - you never know.
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Change your location on your vpn it might traffic logged up
I have Spectrum very really buffers my vpn is somewhere around Albania last time i looked
My thought
Do you cable thru spectrum also or just internet?