My broadband upload speed is supposedly unlimited
Are you sure? What broadband technology are you using? ASDL, SDSL, Cable? You may have unlimited broadband traffic but you will likely have defined upload & download connection speeds.
For example I am on ASDL and get 448kbps upload and 6124kbps download speed, I use a wireless-G router which gives 54mbps (54000kbps) speed.
So when I stream over wifi the iPiMP video stream (which by default is about 320kbps) can easily be handled by the 54000kbps wifi. However when I stream over 3G the 320kbps stream is much closer to my ASDL upload speed of 448kbps - and when you add on the inherent overhead of TCP networking, other services etc. then the upload bandwidth cannot support all this and the 320kbps media stream. In that case the video is dropped and the audio continues as that requires smaller bandwidth (64kbps) which can be supported over the upload bandwidth - this his the nature of the adaptive streaming used by iPiMP.
I intend to make some changes in the next version to encode multiple video streams, at different bitrates (bandwidth) into the transcoding including a low bitrate which will hopefully stream over low upload speeds.
You are also at the mercy of your carrier, location etc. for the 3G download speed. It's not an exact science unfortunately, and everyone has different setups.
I have cable broadband, and from what i have gathered my upload speed limit is 512kbps and download is 20mbps ...
I wasn't aware that the video would dropout...
Wouldn't it make more sense to have the video pause until it caught up again ( like youtube or something ) ??
I think that my problem is my 3G provider, because even if i use WiFi the stream is still going via the internet. I am not streaming directly on my network as my iPhone connects to the internet via WiFi, so therefore my upload speed is good enough.. problem is that my 3G cannot download quick enough.
cheers