Is Time Warner Cable Prioritizing My Network Traffic?

so here's the situation. i have time warner cable in southern california. supposed to be 20 megabit. most of the online speedtests report that is the case and i am very happy with it most of the time.

ever since i got it, any flash videos, mostly youtube, plays like crap on 720 or 1080 settings. always pausing and buffering. in the evening, they'll just plain stop. network activity goes to zero.

this was making no sense to me so, i tried a little test.

i connected to my vpn, expressvpn.net in case you are wondering, and now the videos play flawless on 1080 settings. the gray caching bar in the flash player fills all the way up way before the video finishes. this is what i expect it to do.

i am no network genius by any account. could this be anything but time warner giving extremely low network priority to my flash videos? i didn't think they were allowed to do that?

anyone else have similar experiences or thoughts?

thanks.

I have 24Mbps Uverse and have the same exact problem. I don't have a VPN but yeah speedtests will show 24Mbps right on the dot, but 720/1080p youtube videos will load like 1Mbps usually. I thought it was youtube being lazy about uploading speeds.

I have the same problem sometimes I def need to get on a VPN no down sides to it.

I think this has more to do with network saturation and crap YouTube servers than TWC prioritizing anything.

HeavensCloud said:

I think this has more to do with network saturation and crap YouTube servers than TWC prioritizing anything.

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i think if that were the case, the playback would be bad even when connected through the vpn.

it is literally, like night and day. i can even play 2 videos at 1080 at the same time now. network utilization will fluctuate between 10 and 20 mbit while doing this.

I've found not using TWC's DNS servers to help with streaming video. If I switch over to using TWC's DNS servers, I have a hard time getting Youtube videos, for instance, to play without buffering. If I use Google Public DNS servers, the problem goes away.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/

From what I understand, TWC does not prioritize network traffic, except possibly business class subscribers and TWC's own digital phone service.

Andyk5 said:

I have 24Mbps Uverse and have the same exact problem. I don't have a VPN but yeah speedtests will show 24Mbps right on the dot, but 720/1080p youtube videos will load like 1Mbps usually. I thought it was youtube being lazy about uploading speeds.

Click to expand...

Same here. I thought I had 12mbps but it's actually 12mbps... I should downgrade as the speeds are practically the same.

I think after I played with the DNS servers a few days ago it's working much better, but it was like 4 AM when I tried.

wirerogue said:

i think if that were the case, the playback would be bad even when connected through the vpn.

Click to expand...

Why? Who says their upstream to Youtube goes the same route as to your VPN?

Its probably Comcast trying to do "video optimization". Several major ISPs have been installing equipment from Flash Networks to "optimize" the delivery of video over their networks.Note that their website still touts "mobile solutions", but several wired ISPs are among their customers.

"Optimize", of course, is from the perspective of the ISP. From the perspective of the end user it can be somewhat less than satisfying.

The local caches and CDNs for the YouTube and other traffic that you're assigned for your IP/DNS is probably the issue. Perhaps they're saturated, there is a routing issue, or you're getting the wrong one.

Try different DNS servers. If that doesn't work, the VPN is your only option if whatever you're connecting to is an AnyCast IP address (meaning, you get the nearest host that runs that IP based on routers and routes.)