Nightmarish 20MB youtube experience?

[r00x]

Hey there,

Just thought I'd ask if anyone experiences this same strange scenario. I'm in Reading's RG1 area, hooked up to the net with a Scientific-Atlanta cable modem on Virgin's 20MB service.


It just seems as time has progress this 20MB service has got progressively worse. For example, Youtube videos these days are indescribably slow. I'm on a 20MB service and I can't play a lowest-resolution youtube video without it pausing regularly.

And it's so frustratingly inconsistent. I'll then fire up Speedtest.net and try a few servers and be told my line is operating at, say 13Mbps. That's way, way more than a youtube video needs to load.

Tried literally everything over the months, so there's nothing to debug or resolve here (even had a new modem installed) - it's just slow service, plain and simple.

And why is it that when opening a video the first quarter or so of it rapidly buffers at what looks like 20Mb speeds, before sitting there or crawling forward, inevitably causing the video to pause when the player runs out of data? Anyone else notice that? Macs, PCs, laptops, all the same.

I resent paying extra for 20MB and getting sometimes as little as 5MB benchmarked speeds. At other times I wonder if Virgin prioritises data to speed testing servers (paranoid of me, I know) because the results don't seem to always align with the experience.

Thoughts? :)

[Welshchris]

i used to get problems from time to time on youtube on 20mb but 9 times out of 10 it was youtube that was slow and not connection.

[*sloman*]

youtube like most site use load balancing so one IP wont be allocated more than a couple Mbps bandwidth max depending on how many people are using the site.

Also older videos on youtube seem to take longer to load i presume this is because they use some sort of archiving or switch them to a lower speed/performance server as the video in question doesn't get many hits.

TBH it could be the modem, aren't the Scientific-Atlanta ones really old call VM they might send you a new Ambit 255

[r00x]

Thanks for the replies! I suppose it could be Youtube, as it is certainly the site with the most consistently bad performance. I don't know how to check if I'm using local youtube servers (read about that in a thread somewhere), but I believe everything is configured as expected.

My 'new' modem definitely looks 'old', heheh. But it's actually outperforming the Ambit modem it replaced, which was really starting to flag. I think the old one is an Ambit 256, according to the label.

[Spectato]

Not so much a 'solution', but it might soothe your frustration a little if you hit pause (or just left-click anywhere on the video picture itself) and let it buffer (the faded red bar behind the position marker will show you the amount buffered).
Go off and make some tea, or carry on surfing other stuff while it buffers away!

[AbyssUnderground]

I do this, but it's not a useful solution when an 8 minute video takes 12 minutes to buffer etc etc!