Our Lady of the Rosary Parish, Ennis Road, Limerick
Welcome to Our Lady of the Rosary Parish, Diocese of Limerick

Reception Loss & Technical Advice

The Internet is a complex environment of electronic and communications equipment through which you can access information from diverse sources on your personal computer (PC), tablet or mobile phone.  Things can go wrong along the way.  Sometimes, there’s an easy fix within reach.  Sometimes, you have to wait for an external service to be put right.  We present a few tips in case you are losing reception from the Church Webcam in these times of increased usage during the pandemic.

The buffering symbol is a swirling circular icon which lets you know that a video stream needs time to load into your device.  Video streaming is in great demand in 2020 for work, for leisure, for business meetings, for family communications, as more people are required to stay at home.  System capacity is shared and bottlenecks occur.  What can you do? – Wait a bit; be patient.

You have a modem, which connects your home computer to the Internet and a router, which allows several devices within your home to receive Internet signals.  Both may be integrated in the one box, which you got from your Internet Service Provider (ISP).  If you are losing Internet or it’s getting to be very slow, this box may have to be reset.  How? – Switch it off; wait a minute; switch it on again.

Your device is running many applications.  You have started some of them but others are running in the background.  You are regularly offered updates for the Operating System (OS).  Applications may be configured to update themselves.  The system can become overloaded and freeze.  The PC, laptop, tablet or mobile may have to be rebooted.  How? – Switch it off; wait a minute; switch it on again.

You look at Internet Pages through a Web Browser (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari).  You might get a message saying that your default browser is no longer supported.  What then? – Try another browser; they are generally available as free downloads; if it works, make it your default.

Cache memory is used to store copies of pages you visit and to bring them up quickly when you return.  If the browser had to go back to the source computer (server) each time, it would cause congestion.  When changes are made, they may not come through immediately.  What can you do? – Well, it depends …

  • If your browser has a Refresh Icon, that’s a circular arrow beside the Address Bar, click that.  It should bring in recent text changes but there are other elements it may not reload.
  • On a computer with Windows OS, laptop or PC, if you cannot find a Refresh Icon in your browser window, press function key F5 to refresh the page on your screen.
  • If the simple Refresh is not enough, you may go a step further …
  • On a Windows computer, pressing Ctrl and F5 together, called a Hard Refresh, forces the browser to reload the page you are on.  For Mac users, it’s a different key combination.
  • On a tablet or mobile, go to Settings for the Web Browser (Chrome, Safari, Edge, etc.).  You should find options there to delete browsing history and cache memory.
  • After all that, it may not be your cache that’s full of out-of-date pages.  A Service Provider may also have cache memory on a remote server.

Updates and other changes should come through anyway, in a day or so.  If not, well, that’s as much as we can say.  Further investigation may then be warranted.

In Our Lady of the Rosary Parish, we installed the Webcam as a response to the first Lockdown of Covid-19 in order to bring the Mass to your homes, while you cannot come to Church.  We switch the Webcam on and off every day.  There are many links in the chain, including our Streaming Provider, our Website Service and your ISP.  We monitor the service on a variety of devices and with different browsers.  When we observe problems, we try to have them put right as quickly as possible.

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