I think Comcast is throttling YouTube...?

talk random
1

I have a fast cable connection, but I consistently have problems with YouTube. I recently noticed that I can stream video, even at higher resolution, from other sites - but the second I touch YouTube the stream crawwwls.

Is it totally paranoid of me to suspect that my ISP, Comcast, is preventing me from using the full extent of my bandwidth? It seems to attempt to allow me to use juuuust enough to keep watching the video, but it fails and there’s skipping. :-/

I would assume that it’s YouTube, but from my work connection (I’ve checked the same video from both locations, at the same time) it performs perfectly fine.

2

Fester started a thread called ‘I hate Comcast.’ I’ll bump it for the sake of discussion, Comcast hax.

3

Anyone know of a good way to check this sort of thing?

4

I actually think its youtube itself. I’m sitting at 26mb/s and i the first minute of the video loads instantly then it just slows down to a crawl.

Its very noticeable at my home, but at work it still streams faster than what I can view it (i’m guessing it does on comcast also).

//edit, a simple test on a few videos here at work shows that the first 30seconds loads instantly then youtube throttles the bandwidth to a little bit more than whats required to view.

5

I agree, I saw a video on another system and it streamed near instantly.

6

I don’t have any problems with youtube’s speed but I’m in a completely different location so that doesn’t mean anything.
Could running it through a proxy get around their throttling if thats indeed what there doing?

7

Educated Guess: We’ll the throttle doesn’t prevent the user from viewing the video as its throttled at about 1.5 (estimate), what is needed to view it. So no a proxy wouldn’t do anything as the server is just capping the speed which has little to do with the client.

This goes off the idea that the university network that I’m currently on doesn’t throttle youtube itself.

8

YouTube sucks as of late, I can never find a video I search for anymore, and the download speed is lame.

9

[quote=Templarian;2331653]Educated Guess: We’ll the throttle doesn’t prevent the user from viewing the video as its throttled at about 1.5 (estimate), what is needed to view it. So no a proxy wouldn’t do anything as the server is just capping the speed which has little to do with the client.

This goes off the idea that the university network that I’m currently on doesn’t throttle youtube itself.[/quote]

My thinking was that since its only throttling youtube, then the proxy would mask that you were at youtube. I just don’t know if this works on streaming videos. But I don’t really know any specifics on how a proxy works so meh.

10

It’s probably YouTube I have comcast’s younger brother, Midcontinent (basically Comcast with a different name attached), and it works fine the majority of the time.