In the last few days I have noticed a marked slow-down in the rate in which YouTube videos are downloading.
As far as I can see there are three possible explanations:
- YouTube is suddenly being swamped by traffic and can’t serve up videos as fast
- YouTube video file sizes have increased (if a new codec was deployed, for example) – unlikely as older videos are also coming down slowly
- My ISP (Eircom – no link on purpose!) has suddenly started throttling YouTube content -Â this is quite a strong possibility, I imagine.
I can certainly imagine Eircom wanting to slow down video consumption on their network so have any other Eircom users noticed this too, or is it just me.
On the other hand, if you are not an Eircom user and have also noticed a slow-down of video from YouTube in the last few days, leave a comment here too – it may be one of my first two guesses.
Or a fourth or fifth which I haven’t even thought about!
Am with BT at home and YouTube on Sunday evening was grand.
Hmmm, so it seems to be Eircom specific in that case – thanks Aido.
Eircom in County Waterford here Tom, things seem to be coming down just fine.
Thanks Dennis – well, so much for my Eircom conspiracy theory, eh?
In that case, it must be some kind of local problem.
Hi Tom,
Eircom may be throttling you specifically. Its not unknown for ISPs to put a gate on traffic from individuals who they consider to be ‘ahem’ abusing their service. Check with your neighours and see if they get the same results as you do on an Irish ISP speed test.
Joe.
That’s a possibility Joe but I doubt it – I’m not a heavy user – I watch one or two YouTube videos per day at most and I don’t download BitTorrents.
I’ll enquire with Eircom though – the speed of the service has really deteriorated lately.
I’m with BT in the UK and youtube is pretty slow at the moment. I thought it might be something to do with the launch of the UK specific site, since both that and the ‘main’ youtube site a really, really slow. Something is skewif, just not sure where.
…or fix your DNS settings and route around Eircom’s utter inability to get its own nameservers to resolve anything in under two seconds.
Does the local Youtube work any faster for you http://ie.youtube.com/ , maybe it was because they were doing some work on the regional part of their site recently ?
Tom, I mentioned earlier I’m using Eircom and not seeing any problems. I’m also using OpenDNS, so John’s suggestion might have something to it as well.
John – I had written about OpenDNS previously but had reverted to Eircom’s DNS unwittingly at some point.
After your reminder, I went back to OpenDns once more and Lo! YouTube videos came down much faster once more.
Nice one,
Thanks,
Tom.
youtube is very slow right now from 8-15-07 to now its actually acting as if it was a dial up connection literally i use att yahoo dsl and youtube videos show 3 sec of footage and pauses AND CONTINUES THE PATTERN TILL IT FINISHES
Got eircom broadband last week 2Mb service – youtube is unbelievably slow. Exact same problem as John Madden above. Eircom try to fob it off as spyware
i also notice the slowing down, i think youtube needs to throw away useless videos …celaring those low quality videos..
I have noticed that my youtube videos with Bt have gone slower than before.
It takes a lot of time to download the videos.I hope they do something abt it.
Cheers
I think it has to do with the fact that alot of people are putting these videos on their sites; this still affects bandwidth on the YouTube site doesn’t it?
I think it has to do with eircom…!!!Im also on the 2 meg package, and youtube videos take about 5/10 mins to load its ok in the morning but after about 5pm its horrable,,even loading pages is very slow!!!I have no spy ware or viruses and also ive used linux to see if it makes a diffrence…guess what nope………!!!! I fell i shouldnt pay them for such a bad service but what can you do ???
hi
wow, yes suddenly youtube is about 50 times slower loading . Nothing else has changed.
geoff
Yeah ive noticed it too! im from scotland isp – bt and it freezes for about 20 secs loading a page and videos are slower to :S so maybe bt and eircom are up too something
I again noticed a slow down of youtube videos. I am not sure what’s going on an dstarted browsing the net. That’s when I came across your article. I hope they will fix it soon…
i am unable to watch youtube as it has become unbearably slow in the last two days (16th, 17th)it’s not just the videos but their home page too! i was sure it wasnt the fault of my pc or isp (postoffice broadband)so i put in a search for ‘youtube slow?’ and found this blog! …youtube is free and relatively ungoverned, and that pi**es off a lot of big players, i think things will be changing soon for youtube!
Yes I am on Eircom too, Youtube was grand up to a few days ago but now is crawling unbearably. Have scanned computer and no viruses present. Anyone any ideas?
Isn’t Eircom and Irish ISP? And yet your profile says you are in Sevilla/Spain. I am kinda confused here! 🙂
about 2 weeks ago my eircom 3mb went to 150kilobytes,thats almost like dial up,it seems better now but because it used to average around 1.8 meg now its 2.6,i think eircom upgraded their speeds but during that few days the speed was awwfull,im in donegal so the telephone lines are around 1000 years old and every couple of days one breaks and i have to wait to the fix it,real annoying,
Three or four days ago i coulld watch a clip form The Mission by Johnnie Ho on YouTube without any interruption. But now I can’t. I’m glad to know it’s not juist me. But what’s going on?