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Comment by anoncow | Hacker News Reader

Definitely a step in the right direction, but there are plenty of ISPs who provide preferential treatment to Google by peering with their servers. YouTube HD videos stream without buffering on 512kbps connections.

https://www.quora.com/I-am-from-Mumbai-I-have-an-Internet-co...

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You can get around constant buffering with about 1Mbps and VP9 codec. You can't ever get HD streams with no buffering at 512. If you wait at start for it to move ahead, that is a different story. The reason why you still see the spinner even on 2-3 Megs connection is that although you ISP is saying that you will get 2-3 Mbps, the connection to YouTube streaming server you are fetching content from is notat that rate. You can use the "stats for nerds" option in the yt player to get aprox speed you are getting

Nothing stops anyone else from peering. There's no differential pricing involved here, just regular infrastructure.

While peering enables this, the real problem is that all these ISPs provide YouTube at a much higher speed than the rest of the web, which means that your bandwidth is not enough to stream videos without buffering for any other video site, while YouTube is always smooth.

Peering should just be a step towards enabling ISPs to fulfill their bandwidth promises, not a justification for fast lane/slow lane.

What does peering have to do with anything? 512kbs is 512kbs, no matter how far (within reason) you are from Google.

What's peering?

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