We often grow frustrated at our slow streams and “full servers” when, in reality, it’s rarely the streaming platform’s fault. It’s usually to do with network, storage, or even the battery of our device, and it’s a problem that only shows itself once you’re trying to decode video for two hours straight.
How do I increase my streaming speed?
While download speed can be the bottleneck, it isn’t always as simple as that. Especially if you have fibre optic broadband.
Start by looking at the band you’re actually connected to. A 5 GHz Wi-Fi connection carries a lot more data than 2.4 GHz and is the better choice for 4K video. But, its range is shorter and it passes through walls poorly.
Two rooms from the router, 2.4 GHz can actually outperform it, and that’s worth remembering. Most phones won’t tell you which band they’ve joined unless you go looking, and a lot of buffering gets blamed on the service or your ISP when the answer is the frequency.
A similar situation occurs around audio too, where Bluetooth headphones (older ones are a bigger culprit) introduce latency and compress the signal. This also exacerbates when the battery is low.
Over a long session, wired playback is more consistent. The iPhone 15 and later models have moved to USB-C thanks to EU pressures, which widened the range of wired options considerably.
How do I clean up my phone to make it faster?
Storage is perhaps the quietest of the culprits. Streaming apps write a rolling buffer to local storage to smooth things out for you (in case you go through a tunnel on a train) and a device running close to capacity has very little room to work with.
You’ll get stalling and quality changes rather than outright failure. This can actually be more frustrating because it’s intermittent and feels unexplainable. Clearing downloaded episodes you’ve already watched frees more space than almost anything else on the device.
Display settings are worth a look too. Max brightness and high refresh rates both draw heavily. Fine if you’re indoors with a good phone, but outside in the sun (or indoors while charging), your device can overheat and throttle performance. Video quality may drop, especially if you’re put into battery saver mode.
Why an older phone stutters
Apple designs iPhone batteries to retain 80% of their original capacity after a certain number of complete charge cycles, depending on the model. iPhone 14 models and earlier are designed to retain 80% capacity after 500 complete charge cycles, while iPhone 15 models and later are designed to retain 80% after 1,000 cycles under ideal conditions. In practice, battery ageing varies depending on factors such as usage, charging habits and environmental conditions. As battery health declines, iOS may manage performance to help prevent unexpected shutdowns.
Replacing the battery solves it. So does replacing the phone, and reconditioned hardware is a reasonable route. Back Market, the marketplace for verified refurbished electronics, grades devices before sale and verifies they work. A reconditioned iPhone 15 Pro with a healthy battery may hold a stream better than a newer handset that has already been through 800 cycles.
If the battery can no longer deliver current fast enough under sustained load, no amount of clearing cache will change it.