Comment by whazzmaster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whazzmaster | Hacker News Reader

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U-Verse subscriber here. I have 25Mbps down and I'm glad someone else is noticing this. I first noticed it early of Summer 2012 that 1080p videos were (literally) unplayable; as in no matter how long you waited the video would never start. 720p videos will buffer every 15-30 seconds.

This happens no matter what other bandwidth is being used by other applications or devices. I've actually shut down everything in my house and used the desktop on cat5 to see if it was wireless issues or anything, but the entire rest of the web is snappy and responsive except for HD YouTube.

Thanks AT&T-- the two hundred and forty goddamned dollars a month I'm paying you should defray the cost of the configuration of your service to flirt with the very line of net neutrality.

Dear god please Google Fiber come to Madison.

I have the same issue, but haven't had the time to fully investigate it yet. Other services have excellent download speed, typically about 3 megabytes per second download of say movies purchased through iTunes. But for some reason 1080p YouTube videos will never load.

The only thing that could be causing this is if:

1) YouTube's servers can't push the 1080p video out fast enough. (Very doubtful)

2) U Verse hasn't invested in a capable enough link to YouTube's servers. (Possible, but even a 240p video loads faster than a 1080p video. If it was purely a connection issue then 240p and 1080p videos should load at the same slow speed.)

3) They are purposefully throttling HD YouTube videos to ensure that more bandwidth is available for other things. (I'd say this is most likely.)

Either way some sort of unprofessional and/or shady thing is happening with U Verse and HD YouTube videos.

I have 75Mbps down with a fiber optic provider in my area and Youtube is constantly buffering at any HD resolution.

I'm pretty sure it's Youtube and not our ISPs.

I had a similar problem when living in a college dorm; Youtube was suspiciously slower than the rest of the internet.

A workaround is to use a ipv6 tunnel. Youtube was literally 5 times faster when my tunnel from SixXs was active.

I gave up on U-Verse, it would go down so often. Switched to comcast and not had any problems with netflix or youtube.

I see the same thing on Comcast sometimes, I think it's probably just something wrong with Youtube's routing.

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