Verizon slowing down YouTube?
RMN3
Enthusiast - Level 3
I believe that Verizon is slowing down YouTube and other streaming video websites like Vimeo.
 
I've suspected that this was happening for a while because YouTube seems to load faster using other internet providers with comparable speeds..... But recently i've had an experiance that pretty much convinced me that Verizon is throttling YouTube. What happened was this: A video I was trying to watch on Vimeo was loading so slowly that it was impossible to watch. So I used remote desktop to log into a computer in a nearby town wich uses a different ISP (my university's own Isp), which is only 10 Mbps. The video loaded quickly on the remote computer. I then found the .flv file in the remote computer's internet cache and sent it to myself at home. This happned all while a direct connection between my home computer and Vimeo was going nowhere. 
 
This shows that Vimeo was working fine, and my computer's internet connection was working fine. However, something is getting in the way of a direct connection.
 
I think Verizon only mean to slow down streaming just enough so that there's no spikes in network traffic. But whatever technology they use to do this, fails once in a while. Clearly I'm not the only one who's seeing this problem as I've seen as least 3 other threads about YouTube being slow here recently.
 
Any thoughts?
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Re: Verizon slowing down YouTube?
Hubrisnxs
Legend

could just be youtube.  youtube is a pretty popular site, and gets choked down when they have a ton of users on it.   

Verizon hasn't implimented traffic shaping in that way in the past, so I would be surprised to find out that they are doing it today. 

Just do a google search for youtube + slow and you'll see it's kinda all over the board.

There is also a possibility it's an intermediary server between you and youtube that is getting hammered, so if you do a traceroute to youtube from your PC - we could see if that was the problem..

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