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Comment by pmx | Hacker News Reader

I used to experience this in the UK with Virgin Media. Youtube would be unwatchable and any downloads from the Google Play Store would timeout 80% of the time. Switched my devices over to a VPN and the issue went away immediately. They deny it but thats pretty damning evidence af far as I'm concerned.

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This is because YouTube has servers on Virgin Media's network. In theory that's good, and it is most of the time. But when those servers get overloaded, it doesn't fall back to using the regular YouTube servers.

Unlikely, could also just mean congested upstream routes/bad routing somewhere. Your VPN means traffic takes a different route that isn't affected.

I'm 99% sure VM don't do any throttling (on downstream at least).

I had the same problem for quite a while and was told it was a peering issue.

So while they were not throttling, they somehow messed something up elsewhere and for months my VPN was significantly faster than an un-VPN'ed connection for some bizarre reason.

Proof: https://imgur.com/a/JflXR

Same thing. Connection speed using VPN suddenly doubled and tripled, depending on the time of day.

The problem went away after a few months. Very bizarre though, and of course no transparency from Virgin on this.

Weird, I have Virgin Fibre and have never had any issues with throttling, even when torrenting etc.

Hmm, I never experienced that. I just experience their crappy wifi.

Which could be an issue with the router, device hardware, or even ChromeCast. Anecdotally Youtube seems to interact weirdly sometimes and trigger bugs in other devices.

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