Slow Night-time YouTube


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I am having an issue with YouTube having very slow buffering speeds at nighttime, around 6PM or later. Now I don't remember this being an issue before, and I have a new ISP. I am trying to figure out if it's them.

 

The issue though, is everything else seems fine. I did a speedtest, and though it seemed I got slower speeds, it was still WAY higher then needed for YouTube, and I think the test was a fluke.

 

I even went on Vimeo and other video sites, and they all load without issue.

 

 

So what the heck is wrong with YouTube? Anyone have ideas?

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Ars Technica has a good article on what sounds very much like your problem.

 

Below is are quotes I took from the article that I think describes your problem. 

 

In other words, bad video performance is often caused not just by technology problems but also by business decisions made by the companies that control the Internet.
 
These business decisions involve "peering" agreements that Internet companies make to pass traffic from one to another and negotiations over caching services that store videos closer to people's homes so they can load faster in your browser. When Internet providers refuse to upgrade peering connections, traffic gets congested. When ISPs refuse to use the caching services offered by the likes of Google and Netflix, video has to travel farther across the Internet to get to its final destination?your living room. 
 
...
 
Instead, network operators can degrade traffic by failing to upgrade connections without severing them entirely. The public won't realize that's what's going on unless negotiations become so contentious that one party makes them public?or a government decides to investigate. 
Quote
Degraded connections disproportionately affect the quality of streaming video because video requires far more bits than most other types of traffic.

 

 

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I don't really think that is the issue.

 

I never seemed to have this issue on my old ISP (Distributel). Distributel and my new one, VMedia are all using Rogers lines anyway. Which back in the day when I used Rogers, never had that issue. Unless of course, even with 3rd parties have a choice to upgrade those cache areas.

 

So I am thinking it's YouTube, but why would it randomly start doing this? 

 

That article is quite interesting though, and might be part of the issue at times.

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.So I am thinking it's YouTube, but why would it randomly start doing this? 

 

 

It could be the new ISP uses different servers to connect to YouTube and that cause the slowdown. Like remixedcat said, I'd try OpenDNS or Google DNS.

 
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I already just switched to OpenDNS after doing some tests, it was 127% faster then the one I was on. Everything is faster, except YouTube.

 

It for sure get's better after that timeframe, 6ish to 10ish its per crap. And I didn't have this issue before, so they really cant throttle single sites...hmm

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I know Virgin Media in the UK use cache servers to cache YouTube videos to save them money.. and these get overloaded at peak times causing all sorts of problems like buffering issues, low quality videos etc. This could be the same with other ISP's too that the cache proxy is being overloaded.

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I know Virgin Media in the UK use cache servers to cache YouTube videos to save them money.. and these get overloaded at peak times causing all sorts of problems like buffering issues, low quality videos etc. This could be the same with other ISP's too that the cache proxy is being overloaded.

 

 

Using different DNS will route you to different servers. 

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I guess I am the opposite.. Having been on TWC internet for almost 10 years now.. Youtube is having less and less buffering issues than before.. Right now night time is when I can pretty much stay on "HD" on every video (on wifi that is). During the day and evening its pretty much hit or miss whether I can stay on HD the whole time or not.. This is having been on OpenDNS for the majority of that time.

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Using different DNS will route you to different servers. 

 

I use OpenDNS and it still does it, from my research its all done through proxies way down the line somewhere that you have no control over except for it was proven before blocking the domain ntli.net fixed the issue

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