Hi all, lately I have been experiencing some pretty serious issues with YouTube buffering speeds and I was curious if anyone had any advice on how to take care of the issue. I shall lay out the issue in detail:
A while back with our previous ISP, we were paying for a 1Mbps connection. Normally we'd only get 0.6Mbps, but YouTube was still mostly usable with 360p quality and was completely usable with 240p quality. We somewhat recently upgraded to a new ISP and are paying for a 10Mbps connection. Internet speed tests seem to indicate that we are indeed getting 10Mbps rather consistently. However, YouTube is practically unusable. As there is no way to set a default YouTube quality, the only options are to always load low quality or load the best quality for the connection, there is no way to force it to load 360p. Instead, even with my 10Mbps connection, YouTube very consistently loads with 144p video quality and even then, it struggles to load the video well at all. Often I simply have to give up on the video altogether. Taking speed tests after such incidents would indicate a 10Mbps connection as normal. Interestingly, taking the YouTube speed test would always yield a result of 2Mbps, and that was also reported as the average speed from my ISP. I should be able to easily load 1080p video with my 10Mbps connection, but even 144p is a serious struggle it seems. So I have tried doing this with other browsers, other computers, and even the HTML 5 player when I can, and they all perform the same.
I do live in a rather remote location, but I know that the Internet is set up to ensure that packets generally travel the fastest route from A to B regardless of physical locations geographically speaking. Everything else is very fast, so YouTube should be exactly the same. I'm also quite aware that not many others experience this issue with YouTube, so the issue is almost certainly not with YouTube.
All of that said, ISP packet throttling from high bandwidth sites such as YouTube seems to be the culprit here. Well, that theory has some issues. First of all, I tried entering various IP address blocking commands in the command prompt in the hope of forcing packets from YouTube to take a direct and non throttled and cached route, circumventing ISP packet throttling. This made no difference in the performance of the video buffering, but that was very odd because it raised my YouTube speed test score from 2Mbps to 7.8Mbps. Again, YouTube reported that the average speed from my ISP was 2Mbps. So then I go on to looking at my ISP's website and saw this:
Quote: "All lawful Internet use is handled identically. SKYBEAM does not slow, throttle or shape one type of use over another."
Oh? I also took an online test designed to check whether or not my ISP was throttling on demand video packets as such would occur from YouTube, and it reported it didn't detect any sort of throttling. Oddly however, it reported a speed of exactly 5000kbps. Interesting,
exactly half of the speed we are paying for.
So, I'm completely confused and have no idea what's going on... If anyone has any advice on how to get rid of this problem, I'd massively appreciate it!
