8 ms·

How to stop Time Warner Cable sucking at Youtube

249 points by Reebz 14y ago

rorrr 14y ago
I'm with TWC, and holy crap, now 1080p quality works just fine, whereas most of the time 720p would take forever to buffer. I'm on a 20/2 mbit plan, and it was ridiculous before this fix.
ComputerGuru 14y ago
Wow, I'm surprised at the level of assumptions being made in this thread. Guys, some networking 101: * The route your traffic takes to get from point a to point b depends on your network/ISP/etc * The CDN you use when accessing YouTube, et. al. depends on the route you take. The first/nearest CDN to you is (usually, depending on the CDN owner's configuration) the one that will be used. * The fact that a video loads quickly on one ISP and slowly on another means absolutely, completely, totally NOTHING in and of itself. To find out if the ISP is to blame or not, you must attempt to access the same CDN server from two different ISPs and see if you get the same problem. The latency will be different, but unless there is a massive bandwidth or latency bottleneck between two hops along either route, the overall bandwidth (for a large enough file) should be sufficient to deduce whether or not the problem is with your ISP or the CDN servers corresponding to the route your ISP is taking to contact Google's servers (the results need to be statistically significant taking into account margin of error and network conditions). If the CDN is the problem, unless the CDN is actually owned by your ISP, your ISP is not to blame. In fact, for traditional non-net-neutral throttling, it does not matter which/how many CDN IPs you block. Your ISP should (if they're doing it right) detect your connection to YouTube's subnet and throttle your data rates regardless of which CDN you use. The CDNs in the original article belong to Google/YouTube, not TW. As such, TW would throttle your connection on the way to Google's subnet, not at Google's subnet. They have no control over Google's subnet. The hops past TW's (or whatever ISP you use) servers are not under their control, cannot be bandwidth-throttled by them, and have nothing to do with net neutrality. The real explanation is most likely poorly-balanced CDN servers. i.e. the traffic going to the CDNs is unfairly skewed towards one or more CDN servers, causing them to serve content to all users of all networks more slowly. By explicitly avoiding said CDNs which are slow on Google's end, you will use a different, less-pounded CDN that can serve your content faster. Note that I am not even a TW user (Comcast here), but this lynch mob is getting out of control. I expect a higher understanding of basic network principles when I browse HN, and "I can't load YouTube quickly so this means my ISP is shaping my bandwidth, and I need not look for actual evidence to support this claim" does not qualify as such. That said, yes, it is possible for a cunning ISP to shape your traffic by purposely mis-directing CDN selection, for example, making it so that all their users end up at the same exit (slow) node when contacting a YouTube IP as such effectively YouTube into serving all their content to all the ISP's users from the same CDN node(s), resulting in poor connection. The way to test this would be to map out the routes for packets sent all over, and search for statistically-significant routing anomalies when attempting to pass packets on to Google's network from within a certain ISP. The CDN you use is often selected off a DNS response for many networks. An easy way to select a different CDN (that may adversely affect your browsing speed due to geo-origination!) would be to use a different DNS server (make sure to flush the DNS cache in your OS and in your browser). This is why it's not advised to use non-ISP DNS such as Google DNS, OpenDNS, etc) unless they're both a) anycast (basically CDN for DNS, your DNS query will go to the nearest geographic location to you) and b) have enough servers distributed around the country so that your anycast DNS request will be resolved near you, so that the CDN based off of DNS will also be physically near you. You can use namebench [0] by Google to query the fastest DNS servers, typically faster means closer as hops then physical distance are the biggest factors in DNS speed, though a shitty DNS server will obviously skew those results. 0: https://code.google.com/p/namebench/ https://code.google.com/p/namebench/
- mbell 14y ago
  > The CDN you use when accessing YouTube, et. al. depends on the route you take. The first/nearest CDN to you is (usually, depending on the CDN owner's configuration) the one that will be used. Just load a few videos in youtube with the chrome network tab from dev tools open, you'll very commonly see a CDN request returning a redirect to another CDN, 4-5 redirects isn't uncommon before the video plays. Assuming that CDN selection is purely geographical or route based is just as poor an assumption as your accusing others of.
  - ComputerGuru 14y ago
    > Assuming that CDN selection is purely geographical or route based is just as poor an assumption as your accusing others of. As you yourself quoted, I used the word "usually." That directly and explicitly implies "not purely." The CDN you use depends on many factors. Nearness to your route/physical location is a big factor. The relative power/bandwidth of each CDN server is another factor (weighted distribution). Internal network factors also contribute to the decision, as does maintenance, BGP peering, random load distribution, and current network health/status.
    - mbell 14y ago
      I wrote my comment in response to your original comment, which was worded in a significantly harsher tone. I updated my comment with your edited quote.
    - Reebz 14y ago
      Thanks for the detailed comment above. As I said earlier, I'm no networking guy! However, before posting I did test on a friend's Verizon FiOS connection, my own Verizon Mobile Hotspot, and also the various message boards I read complaining about speed appeared to be overwhelmingly TWC. I do understand that's not ideal proof. This was just intended to be a share of a quick fix. Any suggestion to make my blog post more technically sound, I'm all ears! I can't seem to find a conclusion in all the HN comments except that "it could be a bunch of stuff going wrong", and to be honest, I don't have the expertise to find said conclusion.
shmerl 14y ago
Why are they doing it in the first place? It's a good reason to dump such ISP IMHO.
- kellysutton 14y ago
  Sadly, in a lot of places (e.g. Brooklyn, NY), this is not an option. The ISPs don't compete.
  - PavlovsCat 14y ago
    Then they should be sued.. ?
  - shmerl 14y ago
    I personally avoid cable ISPs precisely because of this kind of junk. Other option is DSL (Verizon), but it's unfortunately 3 Mbit/sec max in many cases. If you are lucky you get 7 or even 15, but it's not common (only if you are very close to the Verizon station). Some rare places have fiber optics, but it seems they stopped expanding it. In general the situation in US is horrible - I still don't understand why there is no competition. Are there any artificial barriers?
    - starpilot 14y ago
      My Verizon DSL is peaking at about 1 mbit/s: http://imgur.com/a/2yXOT http://imgur.com/a/2yXOT . Our plan should be providing 1.1-15. Given that per youtube.com/my_speed, most people on my ISP are getting much better speeds I'm wondering if it's due to my setup. I can't imagine what could be wrong though: it's a Linksys WRT54G running latest version of Tomato firmware, I'm on a MacBook Air.
      - shmerl 14y ago
        Verizon has several DSL plans (one up to 1.5 Mb/s, and then 3 and 7 or 15). In some areas 7 and up are simply unavailable, but I didn't hear that 3 wasn't an option. Try contacting Verizon about it.
mikecane 14y ago
I have been screaming at YouTube for being crap, especially lately. Five seconds of a video would play, then I'd get like a thirty-second pause -- with NO pre-load. I thought this was Google being even cheaper than they have been (doing away with total pre-loads) but now I find out it's been TWC! My god! They should be fined into non-existence.
- cloudwalking 14y ago
  I suspect Google makes more money from showing you ads than they would save on servers/bandwidth/etc by being skimpy.
  - mikecane 14y ago
    The odd thing is, on my primary desktop PC, I am rarely served ads. If I use a Win 7 notebook via WiFi, every YouTube video starts with an ad -- even if it's a video I just watched on the desktop that had no ad. Go figure...
- MikeCapone 14y ago
  I've been having a similar in Canada on Teksavvy DSL, but I'm not sure if it's network congestion because Bell is screwing TSI or if it's some youtube caching issue (or maybe both). If anyone on Teksavvy has a workaround, please let me know. Thanks.
cloudwalking 14y ago
Net neutrality is a myth :(
codva 14y ago
I have this same problem with Comcast. I'm going to try this.
- avree 14y ago
  I can't tell if this is placebo or not, but my YouTube was loading extremely slowly pre-fix (on Comcast) and now is zipping along quickly.
  - salemh 14y ago
    Another anecdotal "yes" seems to be working much faster for me. Versus skipping, slow load times, random freezes, and, impossible to play any youtubes in HD quality at all. Now, I can stream them. I've had many friends around me complaining about YouTube quality as of late, so interesting thread/discussion and quick-fixes.
- agotterer 14y ago
  I have the same problem on fios. For the last few weeks YouTube has been particularly slow. Buffers a few seconds and then hangs for a bit. Edit: a bunch of people complaining on a google group thread about the same thing: https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/?fromgroups#!topic/youtube/CPW7r7OY5Co https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/?fromgroups#!topic/...
LAMike 14y ago
Can TWC get in trouble for this? Isn't this a classic case of anti-competitive practices? And I wonder if Comcast does the same thing for Netflix...
- rhizome 14y ago
  I've had a non-cable DSL connection for years through the same independent provider and noticed about 6-12mos ago that YT was doing the partial-buffer thing. I haven't looked into this too much aside from reading this article and comments, but I'm inclined to think that maybe the problem is with the CDNs rather than TWC or any ISP.
pragone 14y ago
Can anyone explain what these IPs refer to? YouTube CDNs? Some commercial service?
- birken 14y ago
  If you want to know about a particular IP allocation, whois will help you out $ whois 173.194.55.0 I won't include the whole output, but here is the link of the allocation: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-173-194-0-0-1 http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-173-194-0-0-1 Basically, this listed IP block is part of a much larger allocation for Google. I don't know exactly what type of google service is hosted from it, but it isn't a commercial CDN.
- mbell 14y ago
  They are youtube CDN servers, for example: > nslookup o-o---preferred---sn-mv-p5qe---v17---lscache1.c.youtube.com/ > Name: o-o.preferred.sn-mv-p5qe.v17.lscache1.c.youtube.com > Address: 206.111.9.12
wcchandler 14y ago
It's funny, I actually spent a couple hours this evening troubleshooting this problem. I don't think those IPs are complete, but it's a start. For those with tomato firmware: Administration -> Scripts -> Firewall iptables -I FORWARD -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 173.194.55.0/24 -j REJECT iptables -I FORWARD -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 206.111.0.0/16 -j REJECT
- lightyrs 14y ago
  This worked really well for me. Thank you!
- Reebz 14y ago
  I implemented a quick fix that worked for me, but I'm not a networking guy. I would love to hear more if you get further details.
- lor3nzo 14y ago
  It can also be implemented using "Access Restriction" like this http://imgur.com/0sdc0CI http://imgur.com/0sdc0CI
  - wcchandler 14y ago
    Can you SSH into your router and do an `iptables --list` ? I'm thinking that implementation uses the L7 chain. If that's the case then it may be a hair bit quicker using my implementation. Also, the REJECT rule is a bit cleaner than just dropping the packet, which I also suspect to be the case with "Access Restriction" implementation.
    - lor3nzo 14y ago
      I can do iptables under the firewall settings, but ... it took me a while to find my way through this setting and I know it works, I tested by streaming YouTube content on AppleTV. I am going to leave it as it is. If this workaround gets popular, I wonder if my provider (Comcast) and others will catch up and throttle youtube directly. So far so good.
- 14y ago
csense 14y ago
Given how big an ISP Time Warner is, wouldn't the CDN and/or Google eventually notice the slow responses from their end and start playing a game of cat-and-mouse rotating IP addresses in and out of service as proxies?
ineedtosleep 14y ago
Noticed this from TWC somewhat recently as well when I realized that I was taking out my phone to watch YouTube videos more frequently (on 3G/4G). Now, I just keep my computers on a VPN as much as possible and there's a number of sites that just feel faster.
dangrossman 14y ago
Is there any evidence TW is throttling versus these CDN servers you're being routed to simply being slow or overloaded? I've noticed a change in YouTube buffering on FiOS the past few weeks as well. Other commenters here see it on Comcast. That may point to YouTube leaning more heavily on a CDN that can't handle the traffic (or some hop along the network to that CDN) rather than throttling by any one ISP.
- clicks 14y ago
  I have TW... and I just tried what the guy suggested. One hell of a difference. I'm pretty shocked that they're doing this. I always thought it was Youtube that was being slow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB8UADuVM5A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB8UADuVM5A is an accurate depiction of what I just experienced right now.
  - dangrossman 14y ago
    That blocking the CDN improved your loading speed doesn't provide evidence of throttling. It's equally plausible that the CDN is slow for everyone, whether you're a Time Warner subscriber or not. The way to verify this would be to connect to that CDN from different ISPs with similar routes and see if there appears to be a hard cap in one connection but not the other.
    - bsphil 14y ago
      I'm on TWC and this fix with iptables just made a massive difference. Whether it's throttling or not, I'm very impressed with the results.
  - muhfuhkuh 14y ago
    You can easily check if you have a 4g (LTE, HSPA+, WiMax, etc.) and checking the same youtube video in HD. It's truly night and day and really got me so mad at Roadrunner once I discovered that.
    - oh_sigh 14y ago
jdlegg 14y ago
Verizon FIOS has the same sort of behavior.
- tmoertel 14y ago
  My FiOS service has this problem as well. If the problem isn't isolated to TWC, what's really causing it?
  - neurotech1 14y ago
    Inefficient or misconfigured routing/peering between the ISP and the CDN.
jonathanjaeger 14y ago
How do I get Time Warner to start working in the first place? I bought a FreedomPop device just to get 4G wifi for the last month waiting for Time Warner to just fix our Internet (already had 3 separate appointments..). But glad to hear I'm going to have YouTube issues regardless..
uptown 14y ago
If I should decide I wanted to undo this, what's the syntax later on?
- deefour 14y ago
  You can run ipfw delete ____ where ____ is the id of the firewall entry.
  - snprbob86 14y ago
    To clarify, `ifpw list` prints a table of rules where the first column contains rule ID numbers. Use `ipfw del $id`.
dfc 14y ago
Its too bad this breaks youtube-dl. I found a series of videos on youtube that revolutionized the way I do drywall and I can remember waiting forever for youtube-dl to grab the entire playlist.
- Wistar 14y ago
  Can you share the titles?
  - dfc 14y ago
    DryWallGall: https://www.youtube.com/user/drywallgall/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/drywallgall/videos The gentleman in the video is Laurier. I sent him a message on FB thanking him for the videos, he is extremely friendly. There is actually a neat story behind the videos. The current playlist is slightly different than the original set. A while back someone paid him to take the original series offline for six months (under the theory that they were too helpful). Laurier took him up on his offer and when he put them back online the playlist was slightly different but still remarkably helpful. I am an order of magnitude faster now when I rock a room. The biggest change for me was using the concrete trowel instead of the normal 4/6/12 inch mud knife. That being said I did pick up a number of tips from all of the videos. The only thing I cannot do is freehand cuts with a tape measure and a blade, I still use the T. I would suggest watching the entire playlist once before your next project starts and then watch the relevant video before each step as a refresher. I used to dread any project that involved drywall. When I do "habitat for humantiy"-esque projects now I try my hardest to be on the rocking team. EDIT: If you are skeptical about watching all the videos my big ah-ha moment came when I understood "mud control." This is a nice example: http://youtu.be/kPIIWGqzmRw?t=3m6s http://youtu.be/kPIIWGqzmRw?t=3m6s
largesse 14y ago
Technically, doing this is a DMCA violation, right?
- homosaur 14y ago
  Blocking a CDN? I can't imagine, you could make up any reason as a user to justify it.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  The DMCA modernized copyright law for the digital age, creating protections for network providers against infringement by their users, and making illegal circumvention of new digital copyright enforcement schemes. What part of this act do you think applies to throttling network connections, if that's what's happening here?
  - largesse 14y ago
    How then is unlocking a cellphone a violation of a copyright enforcement scheme?
    - dangrossman 14y ago
      That's a separate discussion and a complex topic. A starting point if you're interested: https://www.eff.org/my/node/55941 https://www.eff.org/my/node/55941
- rorrr 14y ago
  No, it is not.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
  No, it's probably some kind of terrorism though.
jaequery 14y ago
the videos/screenshots loads a lot slower after applying the fw rules. especially the thumbnails on the video page on the right side, takes forever to load. anyone else see the same?
- delinka 14y ago
  This is going to be dependent on your location within the network. I'd never assume advice like this will work just anywhere on the planet, let alone within a large country. It certainly does provide a data point for the problem and a localized solution that can be generalized by those with more expertise. This author admits limited expertise with "Other people can dive into the complexity much better than I ever could, but that’s the overall theme."
- mikecane 14y ago
  That is how YouTube has been acting for me as its default for the past two weeks. It's been driving me mad.
spydum 14y ago
Isn't it more likely that those CDN hosts are just overloaded or there are natural throughput limits somewhere between those networks? If TWC wanted to QoS YouTube, why not cover all the ranges?
bcardarella 14y ago
I can confirm that this works well for Verizon FIOS as well. Youtube has been terrible on FIOS the past few months and getting worse.
- mhb 14y ago
  I have also had this problem and I just switched my DNS servers to Google's and now YouTube is usable again.
- bro7861 14y ago
  Could you or someone else provide a detailed process of how to go ahead in implementing these protocols on a standard fios router?
drivebyacct2 14y ago
This is abhorrent. We need more ISP competition. Bring it Google. Or municipalities. Or anyone, please.
rcthompson 14y ago
I wonder if this affects Hulu as well.
p1mrx 14y ago
My "IPvFoo" Chrome extension will show you which IP the video is streaming from: http://ipvfoo.googlecode.com/ http://ipvfoo.googlecode.com/
Aco- 14y ago
TWC customer from NYC here. I tried adding the ip ranges in article and it rendered youtube inoperable for me. No matter what quality setting I used nothing would stream. Removed the rules and youtube streamed again, albeit slow as ever (still cant stream 720 & 1080) I can't stand this ISP and I have no alternative available to me here. Talk about living in misery.
- trustfundbaby 14y ago
  I had a similar problem, it looked like it wouldn't stream, but it actually just took a long time to start, once it did, it buffered very very quickly. but that delay was a killer. had to delete the rules after a couple of videos
- Reebz 14y ago
  Make sure you restart your browser after applying the rules, especially if you had YouTube open. I've had a few people mention this issue.
mbell 14y ago
On Comcast (Boston area) most videos are coming from 208.117.0.0/16 (ish) although some coming from the mentioned blocks. Interestingly for me the domain the videos are coming from are all of the same general form: > r1.sn-jvhj5nu-p5qd.c.youtube.com (where the bit before c.youtube.com varies) Where as the reddit discussion has domains of the form: > o-o---preferred---sn-mv-p5qe---v17---lscache1.c.youtube.com The inclusion of the 'preferred' and 'cache' bit are somewhat interesting. I did find that if I block 208.117.0.0/16 as well as the other two mentions blocks (173.194.55.0/24, 206.111.0.0/16) then no youtube videos will load at all. I would venture a guess that blocking the mentioned ranges is just forcing you to the 208.117.0.0/16 CDN.
tensafefrogs 14y ago
Hi, ex-youtube video eng here. (also posted this as a comment on the blog post) A while ago YouTube put together a speed information page that you could use to check out your download speeds as well as compare to other isps in your area: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed http://www.youtube.com/my_speed I'm also on Time Warner, and my graph shows wild inconsistencies - sometimes it spikes up to much faster than others, sometimes it's way below the average speed, and it also shows that Time Warner is the slowest provider out of all of the NYC area ISPs. I wish it was easier to switch to another provider out here.
- tensafefrogs 14y ago
  And here's a bunch of FAQ + answers about that my_speed page: http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=174122 http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...
  - pgrote 14y ago
    Mine always says Belgium, though I am in the United States. United States isn't an option choice for country. Any idea why?
    - allons-y 14y ago
      Check your DNS settings maybe?
- dangrossman 14y ago
  I'm on FiOS, and my graph also shows wild inconsistencies, sometimes spiking up much faster than others, sometimes way below every other line in the graph for multiple days. I'm leaning towards this not being an ISP problem at all until there's more evidence.
  - agotterer 14y ago
    I'm on fios and am seeing similar results. Starts high and then falls off a cliff far below all other lines then comes up and down.
jasonzemos 14y ago
I've found using youtube over HTTPS is the best defense against an ISP's poor caching and traffic shaping.
- nivla 14y ago
  Could have worked but sadly Youtube only streams videos under http. :(
altcognito 14y ago
Weird, I could have used this thread four days ago. I cancelled my newly purchased 18mb/s uverse account because youtube (and only youtube) was taking 20+ minutes to download 5 minute videos. I switched over the Brighthouse (division of time warner I believe) because I still had an account and everything was fine. When I contacted AT&T, all they did was tell me that youtube was to blame and that I could purchase a tech support contract. I declined :). There's a massive thread on the topic over here: http://forums.att.com/t5/Features-and-How-To/Hey-At-amp-T-Stop-throttling-Youtube-I-d-very-much-appreciate-it/td-p/3094295 http://forums.att.com/t5/Features-and-How-To/Hey-At-amp-T-St...
- ryanhuff 14y ago
  My YouTube experience with uverse has been very frustrating of late. I routinely get streaming freezing, even on lower resolution streams. I have been considering a switch to Time Warner, but perhaps that's not the best solution.
  - altcognito 14y ago
    I checked the speed link given by the ex-youtube engineer and it showed that Brighthouse was actually faster. Those are the exact symptoms I was having (freezing -- basically zero download speed, not that the rendering stop taking place) Not surprisingly enough, I think that it is very location dependent on what ISP provides the best connectivity to a given service (e.g.: the internet is very, very complicated network and it is hard to sum of the performance of any point to point connection with one data point)
aba_sababa 14y ago
Brooklyn here. ..let's just say that if the author ever comes to Brooklyn, he will not leave sober. This is incredible.
EricBurnett 14y ago
This could actually be due to DNS, rather than anything particular to that edge-cache/CDN. Resolvers that aren't actually close to you (network-wise) could cause problems like this, or TWC partitioning their network in a way that causes geographically diverse locations to get lumped together, etc. In essence you'd be talking to edge-caches on the wrong edge, so to speak. To test: try a different DNS resolver, and see if you start getting faster video loads. If you're using TWC's local resolver, try 8.8.8.8 (run by Google); if you're using Google's already try the local resolver and/or OpenDNS (208.67.222.222). If that does work as well, I'd recommend it over the heavy-handed approach of blocking arbitrary netblocks. Especially since that second netblock listed isn't owned by Google, and so you could be collaterally blocking other content that you still want. (Disclaimer: I work for Google, but in Ads, not anything network or YouTube related).
- georgefox 14y ago
  I'm a TWC customer, and I used to have consistently horrible YouTube speeds. I eventually got sick of it and read somewhere to try different DNS, as you suggested. I switched from TWC's DNS to OpenDNS probably around a year ago, and YouTube did become faster. It's less consistent now, sometimes loading nicely and sometimes slowly. youtube.com/my_speed claims I'm averaging 7.6 Mbps vs. the average 5.2 for my ISP and 6.4 for the region. I see occasional traffic from 206.111.0.0/16, but it seems to be coming largely from 74.125.0.0/16 and 173.194.0.0/16.
- driverdan 14y ago
  It doesn't fix the problem. I've tried TWC's DNS, OpenDNS and Google DNS and they all have the same slow YT problem.
megaframe 14y ago
I haven't tried this out. I have noticed some serious throttling on from Comcast for Youtube as of late. I can tell because directly viewing youtube gets throttled about 2min in (so they pick up on it about 2min in, regardless of where I start watching the video). If I VPN to work I can watch the same video no throttle, and still have bandwidth to spare. It's the same bottle neck, Comcast, and work is down the road from me on their own dedicated fiber, it's adding 4 hops and it actually runs faster. (and I checked the IPs, I'm connecting to the same youtube servers as far as I can tell)
trustfundbaby 14y ago
This actually helped a lot, as soon as videos started, the grey buffering meter (that sits behind the red play meter) would shoot over to the other side ... I was actually astonished. Alas there was one horrible side effect. Videos took forever to start playing, and thumbnails for other videos on the screen (in the related videos section and other image assets) would not load until afte the video started playing. so close :\
- Reebz 14y ago
  Some people are having more success using a deny rule, rather than reject. This doesn't make sense to me, as there is a timeout wait element for deny rules, but give it a shot.
bane 14y ago
Fios user here. I'm travelling right now so I can't test. But youtube has been consistently poor for months now. Even 240p is unusable in many cases. Interestingly, I get consistently the best performance from 360p and 1080 with the rest giving absurdly unusable streaming speeds. Not great, but servicable if i go get some coffee while buffers. I wonder if the different resolutions are being served up from different CDNs? Anybody try this on fios and find improvements? (btw my wife gets better streaming performance than i do on youtube from various video streaming sites in asia and i'd bet a dollar i live within 10 miles of a google data center. The google forums are on fire with complaints)
nl 14y ago
Related: I have a Samsung Smart TV, which has a number of video apps including (Australian) ABC iView The performance I was getting was terrible - much much worse than any other device on my home network. Turned out it was because I was using the Google DNS servers for the TV, and that was screwing it up. The ABC iView app uses Akamai, which doesn't use the new DNS extensions to pass through the location of the client computer. Changed DNS server and everything was good again.
- chii 14y ago
  interesting that using google's dns server isn't going to make things faster. I also noticed youtube was slower for me recently, and I do use google's dns. Let me switch back to my isp's dns and see if it makes any difference.
HNLogInShit 14y ago
Can someone explain exactly what these commands do? IPFW is deprecated, and PF is the replacement. I found a GUI front-end for PF (http://www.hanynet.com/icefloor/index.html http://www.hanynet.com/icefloor/index.html ) but it shows that all inbound connections are already blocked. Thus I don't know what the equivalent settings are. Thanks.
trotsky 14y ago
netflix is ~25% of primetime volume youtube is ~12% of primetime volume netflix has an ARPU of $8/mo youtube is probably lucky to have an ARPU of $0.25 netflix pays for transit from multiple t1's with dozens of pops google traffic is 99% settlement free it's almost seems like good video delivery must cost money or something. when you peer with google you have to agree to offer all your routes at all peering points, they make an effort to do local delivery but its always best effort. strangely, i never have a single glitch with netflix even though it always runs 6mbit, but i drop out on 240p often on youtube - this is verizon fios. this whole experience is almost guaranteed to be google saving money or oversubscribing their regional cache boxes. when you block certain class c's or b's you're just steering away from their cdn and hitting their primaries.
trotsky 14y ago
Measuring YouTube Quality of Experience for Users in Residential ISPs* Deep Medhi dmedhi@umkc.edu University of Missouri–Kansas City February 2013 *Joint work with Parikshit Juluri (UMKC), Louis Plissonneau (Orange Labs, France), and Yong Zeng (UMKC) https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog57/presentations/Tuesday/tues.general.Medhi.Youtube.18.pdf https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog57/presentations/Tuesday... tool you can run to measure your own performance with jitter and dropouts and which caches your're being routed to: https://code.google.com/p/pytomo/ https://code.google.com/p/pytomo/ For a bunch of internet enthusiasts y'all sure don't understand much about the world beyond your aws cluster.
Reebz 14y ago
Based on the discussion here at HN, I've updated the title in my blog post to call out "ISPs" generically and not TWC specifically. I felt I did my due diligence sufficiently before crafting my title, but as we know, a sample of one is not statistically significant!
phryk 14y ago
http://npaste.de/p/Cb/ http://npaste.de/p/Cb/ Snippet for the pf firewall. You might have to place the 'block' rule after all 'pass' rules if you use inclusive firewalling…
cygni 14y ago
I'm on FiOS and have also been suffering through terribly slow speeds with YouTube and Twitch.tv. I found that discussion on Reddit about a week ago, and it did temporarily fix my problem. However, after a day or so I noticed my speeds went back down to a crawl. I also experienced this temporary speed increase (from barely streaming 240p to getting smooth 1080p) if I switched locales (adding "&gl=CA" to the end of the URL) or switched to HTTPS.
AinsophaurS 14y ago
Any help how to do this for a Linksys E4200 router with regular firmware?
regnum 14y ago
I followed the steps in the article and it has messed up my YouTube to where it is delayed by about 15 seconds in loading videos.

249 points by Reebz 14y ago

rorrr 14y ago

I'm with TWC, and holy crap, now 1080p quality works just fine, whereas most of the time 720p would take forever to buffer. I'm on a 20/2 mbit plan, and it was ridiculous before this fix.

ComputerGuru 14y ago

Wow, I'm surprised at the level of assumptions being made in this thread. Guys, some networking 101: * The route your traffic takes to get from point a to point b depends on your network/ISP/etc * The CDN you use when accessing YouTube, et. al. depends on the route you take. The first/nearest CDN to you is (usually, depending on the CDN owner's configuration) the one that will be used. * The fact that a video loads quickly on one ISP and slowly on another means absolutely, completely, totally NOTHING in and of itself. To find out if the ISP is to blame or not, you must attempt to access the same CDN server from two different ISPs and see if you get the same problem. The latency will be different, but unless there is a massive bandwidth or latency bottleneck between two hops along either route, the overall bandwidth (for a large enough file) should be sufficient to deduce whether or not the problem is with your ISP or the CDN servers corresponding to the route your ISP is taking to contact Google's servers (the results need to be statistically significant taking into account margin of error and network conditions). If the CDN is the problem, unless the CDN is actually owned by your ISP, your ISP is not to blame. In fact, for traditional non-net-neutral throttling, it does not matter which/how many CDN IPs you block. Your ISP should (if they're doing it right) detect your connection to YouTube's subnet and throttle your data rates regardless of which CDN you use. The CDNs in the original article belong to Google/YouTube, not TW. As such, TW would throttle your connection on the way to Google's subnet, not at Google's subnet. They have no control over Google's subnet. The hops past TW's (or whatever ISP you use) servers are not under their control, cannot be bandwidth-throttled by them, and have nothing to do with net neutrality. The real explanation is most likely poorly-balanced CDN servers. i.e. the traffic going to the CDNs is unfairly skewed towards one or more CDN servers, causing them to serve content to all users of all networks more slowly. By explicitly avoiding said CDNs which are slow on Google's end, you will use a different, less-pounded CDN that can serve your content faster. Note that I am not even a TW user (Comcast here), but this lynch mob is getting out of control. I expect a higher understanding of basic network principles when I browse HN, and "I can't load YouTube quickly so this means my ISP is shaping my bandwidth, and I need not look for actual evidence to support this claim" does not qualify as such. That said, yes, it is possible for a cunning ISP to shape your traffic by purposely mis-directing CDN selection, for example, making it so that all their users end up at the same exit (slow) node when contacting a YouTube IP as such effectively YouTube into serving all their content to all the ISP's users from the same CDN node(s), resulting in poor connection. The way to test this would be to map out the routes for packets sent all over, and search for statistically-significant routing anomalies when attempting to pass packets on to Google's network from within a certain ISP. The CDN you use is often selected off a DNS response for many networks. An easy way to select a different CDN (that may adversely affect your browsing speed due to geo-origination!) would be to use a different DNS server (make sure to flush the DNS cache in your OS and in your browser). This is why it's not advised to use non-ISP DNS such as Google DNS, OpenDNS, etc) unless they're both a) anycast (basically CDN for DNS, your DNS query will go to the nearest geographic location to you) and b) have enough servers distributed around the country so that your anycast DNS request will be resolved near you, so that the CDN based off of DNS will also be physically near you. You can use namebench [0] by Google to query the fastest DNS servers, typically faster means closer as hops then physical distance are the biggest factors in DNS speed, though a shitty DNS server will obviously skew those results. 0: https://code.google.com/p/namebench/ https://code.google.com/p/namebench/

mbell 14y ago
> The CDN you use when accessing YouTube, et. al. depends on the route you take. The first/nearest CDN to you is (usually, depending on the CDN owner's configuration) the one that will be used. Just load a few videos in youtube with the chrome network tab from dev tools open, you'll very commonly see a CDN request returning a redirect to another CDN, 4-5 redirects isn't uncommon before the video plays. Assuming that CDN selection is purely geographical or route based is just as poor an assumption as your accusing others of.
- ComputerGuru 14y ago
  > Assuming that CDN selection is purely geographical or route based is just as poor an assumption as your accusing others of. As you yourself quoted, I used the word "usually." That directly and explicitly implies "not purely." The CDN you use depends on many factors. Nearness to your route/physical location is a big factor. The relative power/bandwidth of each CDN server is another factor (weighted distribution). Internal network factors also contribute to the decision, as does maintenance, BGP peering, random load distribution, and current network health/status.
  - mbell 14y ago
    I wrote my comment in response to your original comment, which was worded in a significantly harsher tone. I updated my comment with your edited quote.
  - Reebz 14y ago
    Thanks for the detailed comment above. As I said earlier, I'm no networking guy! However, before posting I did test on a friend's Verizon FiOS connection, my own Verizon Mobile Hotspot, and also the various message boards I read complaining about speed appeared to be overwhelmingly TWC. I do understand that's not ideal proof. This was just intended to be a share of a quick fix. Any suggestion to make my blog post more technically sound, I'm all ears! I can't seem to find a conclusion in all the HN comments except that "it could be a bunch of stuff going wrong", and to be honest, I don't have the expertise to find said conclusion.

shmerl 14y ago

Why are they doing it in the first place? It's a good reason to dump such ISP IMHO.

kellysutton 14y ago
Sadly, in a lot of places (e.g. Brooklyn, NY), this is not an option. The ISPs don't compete.
- PavlovsCat 14y ago
  Then they should be sued.. ?
- shmerl 14y ago
  I personally avoid cable ISPs precisely because of this kind of junk. Other option is DSL (Verizon), but it's unfortunately 3 Mbit/sec max in many cases. If you are lucky you get 7 or even 15, but it's not common (only if you are very close to the Verizon station). Some rare places have fiber optics, but it seems they stopped expanding it. In general the situation in US is horrible - I still don't understand why there is no competition. Are there any artificial barriers?
  - starpilot 14y ago
    My Verizon DSL is peaking at about 1 mbit/s: http://imgur.com/a/2yXOT http://imgur.com/a/2yXOT . Our plan should be providing 1.1-15. Given that per youtube.com/my_speed, most people on my ISP are getting much better speeds I'm wondering if it's due to my setup. I can't imagine what could be wrong though: it's a Linksys WRT54G running latest version of Tomato firmware, I'm on a MacBook Air.
    - shmerl 14y ago
      Verizon has several DSL plans (one up to 1.5 Mb/s, and then 3 and 7 or 15). In some areas 7 and up are simply unavailable, but I didn't hear that 3 wasn't an option. Try contacting Verizon about it.

mikecane 14y ago

I have been screaming at YouTube for being crap, especially lately. Five seconds of a video would play, then I'd get like a thirty-second pause -- with NO pre-load. I thought this was Google being even cheaper than they have been (doing away with total pre-loads) but now I find out it's been TWC! My god! They should be fined into non-existence.

cloudwalking 14y ago
I suspect Google makes more money from showing you ads than they would save on servers/bandwidth/etc by being skimpy.
- mikecane 14y ago
  The odd thing is, on my primary desktop PC, I am rarely served ads. If I use a Win 7 notebook via WiFi, every YouTube video starts with an ad -- even if it's a video I just watched on the desktop that had no ad. Go figure...
MikeCapone 14y ago
I've been having a similar in Canada on Teksavvy DSL, but I'm not sure if it's network congestion because Bell is screwing TSI or if it's some youtube caching issue (or maybe both). If anyone on Teksavvy has a workaround, please let me know. Thanks.

cloudwalking 14y ago

Net neutrality is a myth :(

codva 14y ago

I have this same problem with Comcast. I'm going to try this.

avree 14y ago
I can't tell if this is placebo or not, but my YouTube was loading extremely slowly pre-fix (on Comcast) and now is zipping along quickly.
- salemh 14y ago
  Another anecdotal "yes" seems to be working much faster for me. Versus skipping, slow load times, random freezes, and, impossible to play any youtubes in HD quality at all. Now, I can stream them. I've had many friends around me complaining about YouTube quality as of late, so interesting thread/discussion and quick-fixes.
agotterer 14y ago
I have the same problem on fios. For the last few weeks YouTube has been particularly slow. Buffers a few seconds and then hangs for a bit. Edit: a bunch of people complaining on a google group thread about the same thing: https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/?fromgroups#!topic/youtube/CPW7r7OY5Co https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/?fromgroups#!topic/...

LAMike 14y ago

Can TWC get in trouble for this? Isn't this a classic case of anti-competitive practices? And I wonder if Comcast does the same thing for Netflix...

rhizome 14y ago
I've had a non-cable DSL connection for years through the same independent provider and noticed about 6-12mos ago that YT was doing the partial-buffer thing. I haven't looked into this too much aside from reading this article and comments, but I'm inclined to think that maybe the problem is with the CDNs rather than TWC or any ISP.

pragone 14y ago

Can anyone explain what these IPs refer to? YouTube CDNs? Some commercial service?

birken 14y ago
If you want to know about a particular IP allocation, whois will help you out $ whois 173.194.55.0 I won't include the whole output, but here is the link of the allocation: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-173-194-0-0-1 http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-173-194-0-0-1 Basically, this listed IP block is part of a much larger allocation for Google. I don't know exactly what type of google service is hosted from it, but it isn't a commercial CDN.
mbell 14y ago
They are youtube CDN servers, for example: > nslookup o-o---preferred---sn-mv-p5qe---v17---lscache1.c.youtube.com/ > Name: o-o.preferred.sn-mv-p5qe.v17.lscache1.c.youtube.com > Address: 206.111.9.12

wcchandler 14y ago

It's funny, I actually spent a couple hours this evening troubleshooting this problem. I don't think those IPs are complete, but it's a start. For those with tomato firmware: Administration -> Scripts -> Firewall iptables -I FORWARD -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 173.194.55.0/24 -j REJECT iptables -I FORWARD -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 206.111.0.0/16 -j REJECT

lightyrs 14y ago
This worked really well for me. Thank you!
Reebz 14y ago
I implemented a quick fix that worked for me, but I'm not a networking guy. I would love to hear more if you get further details.
lor3nzo 14y ago
It can also be implemented using "Access Restriction" like this http://imgur.com/0sdc0CI http://imgur.com/0sdc0CI
- wcchandler 14y ago
  Can you SSH into your router and do an `iptables --list` ? I'm thinking that implementation uses the L7 chain. If that's the case then it may be a hair bit quicker using my implementation. Also, the REJECT rule is a bit cleaner than just dropping the packet, which I also suspect to be the case with "Access Restriction" implementation.
  - lor3nzo 14y ago
    I can do iptables under the firewall settings, but ... it took me a while to find my way through this setting and I know it works, I tested by streaming YouTube content on AppleTV. I am going to leave it as it is. If this workaround gets popular, I wonder if my provider (Comcast) and others will catch up and throttle youtube directly. So far so good.
14y ago

csense 14y ago

Given how big an ISP Time Warner is, wouldn't the CDN and/or Google eventually notice the slow responses from their end and start playing a game of cat-and-mouse rotating IP addresses in and out of service as proxies?

ineedtosleep 14y ago

Noticed this from TWC somewhat recently as well when I realized that I was taking out my phone to watch YouTube videos more frequently (on 3G/4G). Now, I just keep my computers on a VPN as much as possible and there's a number of sites that just feel faster.

dangrossman 14y ago

Is there any evidence TW is throttling versus these CDN servers you're being routed to simply being slow or overloaded? I've noticed a change in YouTube buffering on FiOS the past few weeks as well. Other commenters here see it on Comcast. That may point to YouTube leaning more heavily on a CDN that can't handle the traffic (or some hop along the network to that CDN) rather than throttling by any one ISP.

clicks 14y ago
I have TW... and I just tried what the guy suggested. One hell of a difference. I'm pretty shocked that they're doing this. I always thought it was Youtube that was being slow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB8UADuVM5A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB8UADuVM5A is an accurate depiction of what I just experienced right now.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  That blocking the CDN improved your loading speed doesn't provide evidence of throttling. It's equally plausible that the CDN is slow for everyone, whether you're a Time Warner subscriber or not. The way to verify this would be to connect to that CDN from different ISPs with similar routes and see if there appears to be a hard cap in one connection but not the other.
  - bsphil 14y ago
    I'm on TWC and this fix with iptables just made a massive difference. Whether it's throttling or not, I'm very impressed with the results.
- muhfuhkuh 14y ago
  You can easily check if you have a 4g (LTE, HSPA+, WiMax, etc.) and checking the same youtube video in HD. It's truly night and day and really got me so mad at Roadrunner once I discovered that.
  - oh_sigh 14y ago

jdlegg 14y ago

Verizon FIOS has the same sort of behavior.

tmoertel 14y ago
My FiOS service has this problem as well. If the problem isn't isolated to TWC, what's really causing it?
- neurotech1 14y ago
  Inefficient or misconfigured routing/peering between the ISP and the CDN.

jonathanjaeger 14y ago

How do I get Time Warner to start working in the first place? I bought a FreedomPop device just to get 4G wifi for the last month waiting for Time Warner to just fix our Internet (already had 3 separate appointments..). But glad to hear I'm going to have YouTube issues regardless..

uptown 14y ago

If I should decide I wanted to undo this, what's the syntax later on?

deefour 14y ago
You can run ipfw delete ____ where ____ is the id of the firewall entry.
- snprbob86 14y ago
  To clarify, `ifpw list` prints a table of rules where the first column contains rule ID numbers. Use `ipfw del $id`.

dfc 14y ago

Its too bad this breaks youtube-dl. I found a series of videos on youtube that revolutionized the way I do drywall and I can remember waiting forever for youtube-dl to grab the entire playlist.

Wistar 14y ago
Can you share the titles?
- dfc 14y ago
  DryWallGall: https://www.youtube.com/user/drywallgall/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/drywallgall/videos The gentleman in the video is Laurier. I sent him a message on FB thanking him for the videos, he is extremely friendly. There is actually a neat story behind the videos. The current playlist is slightly different than the original set. A while back someone paid him to take the original series offline for six months (under the theory that they were too helpful). Laurier took him up on his offer and when he put them back online the playlist was slightly different but still remarkably helpful. I am an order of magnitude faster now when I rock a room. The biggest change for me was using the concrete trowel instead of the normal 4/6/12 inch mud knife. That being said I did pick up a number of tips from all of the videos. The only thing I cannot do is freehand cuts with a tape measure and a blade, I still use the T. I would suggest watching the entire playlist once before your next project starts and then watch the relevant video before each step as a refresher. I used to dread any project that involved drywall. When I do "habitat for humantiy"-esque projects now I try my hardest to be on the rocking team. EDIT: If you are skeptical about watching all the videos my big ah-ha moment came when I understood "mud control." This is a nice example: http://youtu.be/kPIIWGqzmRw?t=3m6s http://youtu.be/kPIIWGqzmRw?t=3m6s

largesse 14y ago

Technically, doing this is a DMCA violation, right?

homosaur 14y ago
Blocking a CDN? I can't imagine, you could make up any reason as a user to justify it.
dangrossman 14y ago
The DMCA modernized copyright law for the digital age, creating protections for network providers against infringement by their users, and making illegal circumvention of new digital copyright enforcement schemes. What part of this act do you think applies to throttling network connections, if that's what's happening here?
- largesse 14y ago
  How then is unlocking a cellphone a violation of a copyright enforcement scheme?
  - dangrossman 14y ago
    That's a separate discussion and a complex topic. A starting point if you're interested: https://www.eff.org/my/node/55941 https://www.eff.org/my/node/55941
rorrr 14y ago
No, it is not.
fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
No, it's probably some kind of terrorism though.

jaequery 14y ago

the videos/screenshots loads a lot slower after applying the fw rules. especially the thumbnails on the video page on the right side, takes forever to load. anyone else see the same?

delinka 14y ago
This is going to be dependent on your location within the network. I'd never assume advice like this will work just anywhere on the planet, let alone within a large country. It certainly does provide a data point for the problem and a localized solution that can be generalized by those with more expertise. This author admits limited expertise with "Other people can dive into the complexity much better than I ever could, but that’s the overall theme."
mikecane 14y ago
That is how YouTube has been acting for me as its default for the past two weeks. It's been driving me mad.

spydum 14y ago

Isn't it more likely that those CDN hosts are just overloaded or there are natural throughput limits somewhere between those networks? If TWC wanted to QoS YouTube, why not cover all the ranges?

bcardarella 14y ago

I can confirm that this works well for Verizon FIOS as well. Youtube has been terrible on FIOS the past few months and getting worse.

mhb 14y ago
I have also had this problem and I just switched my DNS servers to Google's and now YouTube is usable again.
bro7861 14y ago
Could you or someone else provide a detailed process of how to go ahead in implementing these protocols on a standard fios router?

drivebyacct2 14y ago

This is abhorrent. We need more ISP competition. Bring it Google. Or municipalities. Or anyone, please.

rcthompson 14y ago

I wonder if this affects Hulu as well.

p1mrx 14y ago

My "IPvFoo" Chrome extension will show you which IP the video is streaming from: http://ipvfoo.googlecode.com/ http://ipvfoo.googlecode.com/

Aco- 14y ago

TWC customer from NYC here. I tried adding the ip ranges in article and it rendered youtube inoperable for me. No matter what quality setting I used nothing would stream. Removed the rules and youtube streamed again, albeit slow as ever (still cant stream 720 & 1080) I can't stand this ISP and I have no alternative available to me here. Talk about living in misery.

trustfundbaby 14y ago
I had a similar problem, it looked like it wouldn't stream, but it actually just took a long time to start, once it did, it buffered very very quickly. but that delay was a killer. had to delete the rules after a couple of videos
Reebz 14y ago
Make sure you restart your browser after applying the rules, especially if you had YouTube open. I've had a few people mention this issue.

mbell 14y ago

On Comcast (Boston area) most videos are coming from 208.117.0.0/16 (ish) although some coming from the mentioned blocks. Interestingly for me the domain the videos are coming from are all of the same general form: > r1.sn-jvhj5nu-p5qd.c.youtube.com (where the bit before c.youtube.com varies) Where as the reddit discussion has domains of the form: > o-o---preferred---sn-mv-p5qe---v17---lscache1.c.youtube.com The inclusion of the 'preferred' and 'cache' bit are somewhat interesting. I did find that if I block 208.117.0.0/16 as well as the other two mentions blocks (173.194.55.0/24, 206.111.0.0/16) then no youtube videos will load at all. I would venture a guess that blocking the mentioned ranges is just forcing you to the 208.117.0.0/16 CDN.

tensafefrogs 14y ago

Hi, ex-youtube video eng here. (also posted this as a comment on the blog post) A while ago YouTube put together a speed information page that you could use to check out your download speeds as well as compare to other isps in your area: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed http://www.youtube.com/my_speed I'm also on Time Warner, and my graph shows wild inconsistencies - sometimes it spikes up to much faster than others, sometimes it's way below the average speed, and it also shows that Time Warner is the slowest provider out of all of the NYC area ISPs. I wish it was easier to switch to another provider out here.

tensafefrogs 14y ago
And here's a bunch of FAQ + answers about that my_speed page: http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=174122 http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...
- pgrote 14y ago
  Mine always says Belgium, though I am in the United States. United States isn't an option choice for country. Any idea why?
  - allons-y 14y ago
    Check your DNS settings maybe?
dangrossman 14y ago
I'm on FiOS, and my graph also shows wild inconsistencies, sometimes spiking up much faster than others, sometimes way below every other line in the graph for multiple days. I'm leaning towards this not being an ISP problem at all until there's more evidence.
- agotterer 14y ago
  I'm on fios and am seeing similar results. Starts high and then falls off a cliff far below all other lines then comes up and down.

jasonzemos 14y ago

I've found using youtube over HTTPS is the best defense against an ISP's poor caching and traffic shaping.

nivla 14y ago
Could have worked but sadly Youtube only streams videos under http. :(

altcognito 14y ago

Weird, I could have used this thread four days ago. I cancelled my newly purchased 18mb/s uverse account because youtube (and only youtube) was taking 20+ minutes to download 5 minute videos. I switched over the Brighthouse (division of time warner I believe) because I still had an account and everything was fine. When I contacted AT&T, all they did was tell me that youtube was to blame and that I could purchase a tech support contract. I declined :). There's a massive thread on the topic over here: http://forums.att.com/t5/Features-and-How-To/Hey-At-amp-T-Stop-throttling-Youtube-I-d-very-much-appreciate-it/td-p/3094295 http://forums.att.com/t5/Features-and-How-To/Hey-At-amp-T-St...

ryanhuff 14y ago
My YouTube experience with uverse has been very frustrating of late. I routinely get streaming freezing, even on lower resolution streams. I have been considering a switch to Time Warner, but perhaps that's not the best solution.
- altcognito 14y ago
  I checked the speed link given by the ex-youtube engineer and it showed that Brighthouse was actually faster. Those are the exact symptoms I was having (freezing -- basically zero download speed, not that the rendering stop taking place) Not surprisingly enough, I think that it is very location dependent on what ISP provides the best connectivity to a given service (e.g.: the internet is very, very complicated network and it is hard to sum of the performance of any point to point connection with one data point)

aba_sababa 14y ago

Brooklyn here. ..let's just say that if the author ever comes to Brooklyn, he will not leave sober. This is incredible.

EricBurnett 14y ago

This could actually be due to DNS, rather than anything particular to that edge-cache/CDN. Resolvers that aren't actually close to you (network-wise) could cause problems like this, or TWC partitioning their network in a way that causes geographically diverse locations to get lumped together, etc. In essence you'd be talking to edge-caches on the wrong edge, so to speak. To test: try a different DNS resolver, and see if you start getting faster video loads. If you're using TWC's local resolver, try 8.8.8.8 (run by Google); if you're using Google's already try the local resolver and/or OpenDNS (208.67.222.222). If that does work as well, I'd recommend it over the heavy-handed approach of blocking arbitrary netblocks. Especially since that second netblock listed isn't owned by Google, and so you could be collaterally blocking other content that you still want. (Disclaimer: I work for Google, but in Ads, not anything network or YouTube related).

georgefox 14y ago
I'm a TWC customer, and I used to have consistently horrible YouTube speeds. I eventually got sick of it and read somewhere to try different DNS, as you suggested. I switched from TWC's DNS to OpenDNS probably around a year ago, and YouTube did become faster. It's less consistent now, sometimes loading nicely and sometimes slowly. youtube.com/my_speed claims I'm averaging 7.6 Mbps vs. the average 5.2 for my ISP and 6.4 for the region. I see occasional traffic from 206.111.0.0/16, but it seems to be coming largely from 74.125.0.0/16 and 173.194.0.0/16.
driverdan 14y ago
It doesn't fix the problem. I've tried TWC's DNS, OpenDNS and Google DNS and they all have the same slow YT problem.

megaframe 14y ago

I haven't tried this out. I have noticed some serious throttling on from Comcast for Youtube as of late. I can tell because directly viewing youtube gets throttled about 2min in (so they pick up on it about 2min in, regardless of where I start watching the video). If I VPN to work I can watch the same video no throttle, and still have bandwidth to spare. It's the same bottle neck, Comcast, and work is down the road from me on their own dedicated fiber, it's adding 4 hops and it actually runs faster. (and I checked the IPs, I'm connecting to the same youtube servers as far as I can tell)

trustfundbaby 14y ago

This actually helped a lot, as soon as videos started, the grey buffering meter (that sits behind the red play meter) would shoot over to the other side ... I was actually astonished. Alas there was one horrible side effect. Videos took forever to start playing, and thumbnails for other videos on the screen (in the related videos section and other image assets) would not load until afte the video started playing. so close :\

Reebz 14y ago
Some people are having more success using a deny rule, rather than reject. This doesn't make sense to me, as there is a timeout wait element for deny rules, but give it a shot.

bane 14y ago

Fios user here. I'm travelling right now so I can't test. But youtube has been consistently poor for months now. Even 240p is unusable in many cases. Interestingly, I get consistently the best performance from 360p and 1080 with the rest giving absurdly unusable streaming speeds. Not great, but servicable if i go get some coffee while buffers. I wonder if the different resolutions are being served up from different CDNs? Anybody try this on fios and find improvements? (btw my wife gets better streaming performance than i do on youtube from various video streaming sites in asia and i'd bet a dollar i live within 10 miles of a google data center. The google forums are on fire with complaints)

nl 14y ago

Related: I have a Samsung Smart TV, which has a number of video apps including (Australian) ABC iView The performance I was getting was terrible - much much worse than any other device on my home network. Turned out it was because I was using the Google DNS servers for the TV, and that was screwing it up. The ABC iView app uses Akamai, which doesn't use the new DNS extensions to pass through the location of the client computer. Changed DNS server and everything was good again.

chii 14y ago
interesting that using google's dns server isn't going to make things faster. I also noticed youtube was slower for me recently, and I do use google's dns. Let me switch back to my isp's dns and see if it makes any difference.

HNLogInShit 14y ago

Can someone explain exactly what these commands do? IPFW is deprecated, and PF is the replacement. I found a GUI front-end for PF (http://www.hanynet.com/icefloor/index.html http://www.hanynet.com/icefloor/index.html ) but it shows that all inbound connections are already blocked. Thus I don't know what the equivalent settings are. Thanks.

trotsky 14y ago

netflix is ~25% of primetime volume youtube is ~12% of primetime volume netflix has an ARPU of $8/mo youtube is probably lucky to have an ARPU of $0.25 netflix pays for transit from multiple t1's with dozens of pops google traffic is 99% settlement free it's almost seems like good video delivery must cost money or something. when you peer with google you have to agree to offer all your routes at all peering points, they make an effort to do local delivery but its always best effort. strangely, i never have a single glitch with netflix even though it always runs 6mbit, but i drop out on 240p often on youtube - this is verizon fios. this whole experience is almost guaranteed to be google saving money or oversubscribing their regional cache boxes. when you block certain class c's or b's you're just steering away from their cdn and hitting their primaries.

trotsky 14y ago

Measuring YouTube Quality of Experience for Users in Residential ISPs* Deep Medhi dmedhi@umkc.edu University of Missouri–Kansas City February 2013 *Joint work with Parikshit Juluri (UMKC), Louis Plissonneau (Orange Labs, France), and Yong Zeng (UMKC) https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog57/presentations/Tuesday/tues.general.Medhi.Youtube.18.pdf https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog57/presentations/Tuesday... tool you can run to measure your own performance with jitter and dropouts and which caches your're being routed to: https://code.google.com/p/pytomo/ https://code.google.com/p/pytomo/ For a bunch of internet enthusiasts y'all sure don't understand much about the world beyond your aws cluster.

Reebz 14y ago

Based on the discussion here at HN, I've updated the title in my blog post to call out "ISPs" generically and not TWC specifically. I felt I did my due diligence sufficiently before crafting my title, but as we know, a sample of one is not statistically significant!

phryk 14y ago

http://npaste.de/p/Cb/ http://npaste.de/p/Cb/ Snippet for the pf firewall. You might have to place the 'block' rule after all 'pass' rules if you use inclusive firewalling…

cygni 14y ago

I'm on FiOS and have also been suffering through terribly slow speeds with YouTube and Twitch.tv. I found that discussion on Reddit about a week ago, and it did temporarily fix my problem. However, after a day or so I noticed my speeds went back down to a crawl. I also experienced this temporary speed increase (from barely streaming 240p to getting smooth 1080p) if I switched locales (adding "&gl=CA" to the end of the URL) or switched to HTTPS.

AinsophaurS 14y ago

Any help how to do this for a Linksys E4200 router with regular firmware?

regnum 14y ago

I followed the steps in the article and it has messed up my YouTube to where it is delayed by about 15 seconds in loading videos.