If the test sound on the side does not play a small jazz sample and your volume and speakers are setup correctly, then there there two likely sources of issues:

• Firewall settings
• Browser configuration

Please remember that the squawk audio is not continuous and typically broadcasts small messages every few minutes, along with larger clips round the turn of the hour when important news is more likely to occur.

Firewall Settings

Most home routers and firewalls should not have an issue, but corporate firewalls might block the audio service because it runs a unique port.

If you need to modify your firewall settings these are the IP/ports/protocols you will need to open:

• IP 109.109.255.66
• Port / Protocol 1935 TCP

Browser settings

The RANsquawk portal is designed to work on most modern browsers. e.g. IE >= 7, Firefox 3.x, Safari and Chrome. IE6 and Firefox should work too, but these are not officially supported.

If you are having issues in Internet Explorer, sometimes it can have bad configuration settings. You can reset the settings by going to Tools → Internet Options → Advanced → Reset Defaults

JavaScript

If JavaScript is not working, you will probably have a message at the top of this page informing you of this. This can be common in some corporate installations of Internet Explorer, where restrictive security settings may prevent scripts from running. You can ensure JavaScript works by following the instructions at the URL below:

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/howtoscript

Flash

You will need to run Flash 10 or later to listen to the audio squawk. If you do not have this, a message should appear at the top of the page informing you, with a link to the installation page.

Still got problems

Please contact us

What operating systems do you support?

All major PC and Mac operating systems are supported. You will need to have JavaScript and Flash 10 installed / enabled.

Currently we do not support the iPhone as Apple refuse to support Flash on the iPhone platform.

How much bandwidth does the audio use?

The RANsquawk Portal player uses 2-3KB/s (kilobytes per second) for streaming, which should just about stream over a modem. However we recommend at least an ISDN/ADSL line in order to provide a quality service that allows you to perform other on-line activities while you listen.

Is your software compatible with Proxy Servers?

If you have to run behind a proxy server, then the audio may become delayed as it tries to work round the security settings of your PC. This is because of the extra overhead involved with tunneling data over HTTP which is not designed for real-time applications. Please see the firewall instructions above for instructions on resolving this.

Audio seems to lag or is unreliable

There are a number of causes for this. While the RANsquawk Portal does everything in its power to minimise lag, there might be additional delay caused by your Internet connection / provider. If your connection lags more than 1.5 seconds from our broadcasting server then you will notice cut-outs in the audio.

Please look into the following:

• Ensure your firewall settings are not causing an issue. Try disabling the firewall, or any unnecessary routers from your network to see if this helps for the short term.
• Ensure your computer is virus free, and does not have lots of background tasks running that could be consuming excessive system resources.
• Software such as Software Updates, and Peer to Peer traffic such as torrents can consume upstream bandwidth which in turn heavily affects downstream responsiveness on most ADSL connections.

Wireless LAN (WLAN) networks often cause problems and their performance can easily be affected by distance, interior walls and/or nearby electrical items. Such interference is not necessarily noticeable when checking email or browsing static websites, but streaming media such as RANsquawk will experience breaks and/or lags in the sound stream.

If you are having persistent issues with this, please contact_us