Because the router is usually delivering fine and the app usually is not. A live channel arrives as roughly six-second segments, and the player has to hold a list of every visible channel in memory while buffering that video. On a large catalog, the list wins and the buffer starves, which produces stalling that looks exactly like a network fault and survives every network change you make. Hiding unused groups, setting the live buffer to none and pointing the device at a public resolver are three changes that cost nothing, take ten minutes and hold for months. Only after those should you spend money on cables, extenders or a faster plan you probably do not need.

Add it up rather than guessing. A 1080p stream wants 5-8 Mbps steady and uses about 3 GB an hour; a 4K stream wants 15-25 Mbps and about 7 GB an hour. HEVC delivers the same picture at roughly half the bitrate of H.264, so a service offering HEVC feeds effectively doubles your margin. Two 4K streams and a console downloading a patch is a realistic evening in a family house and can eat a connection that tests beautifully at noon. IP4KTV plans carry 1 to 5 simultaneous connections, so pick the number that matches how many screens actually run at once instead of how many devices exist.

The part that belongs to the service. If a provider sells more concurrent viewers than its servers carry, the whole lineup stutters at kickoff and settles later, on every device, on every network you test. No habit, setting or cable reaches it, and saying otherwise would waste your evening. That is the argument for judging a service on a figure instead of a description. IP4KTV publishes 99.99% uptime, about 53 minutes of downtime across a year, with 31,000+ subscribers and delivery across 190+ countries, and a $5 24-hour trial exists so you can hold the claim against a live event of your own choosing.

Treat two things as maintenance. First, the visible channel list, which grows every time a provider adds categories and a refresh pulls them in; a minute spent hiding new groups each month prevents the memory fault from creeping back. Second, household headroom, which changes when someone adds a device or a new game starts patching itself nightly. Everything else you set once: buffer to none, public resolver, wired where possible. Keep a two-line log of any failure with the channel, group and time. Most people who claim nothing works have changed six things without recording any of them, and cannot tell which evening was actually clean.