Dear Geeks,

In Beirut I have a 4mb DSL connection with terranet. It is great for downloads and all that good stuff, but when it comes to Youtube it can barely load 240p without lagging and making the video unwatchable unless I let it load for 20 minutes. And I even downloaded the DU meter and I saw download speeds of up to 500kb/s and on speedtest I reach a download speed of 3.39mb (and at that moment youtube videos are still slow!) I thought it was from my laptop, but even my phone is the same when I connect.

In the Mountains, I have a 1mb connection with IDM, and I can load youtube videos 360p without waiting and it is really convenient.

How is this possible?
Traffic Shapping, simple like that, only way to bypass it is to use a VPN
Terranet is probably throttling youtube and some other sites because it is oversubscribed and needs to maximize its stretched resources. It happens with providers in the US too, although not to that degree. Some ISP's will throttle bandwidth to video streaming sites like Hulu and Netflix for the same reasons and that there are no real net neutrality rules in the US (or Lebanon for that matter).
Thanks guys! So I learned a new concept of "throttling" today which is interesting, I am not much of a tech savy I guess I will look into the VPN.

But I have a question, if Youtube is really popular and lots of consumers are on it, why would they throttle it? Wouldnt it be more ideal if they tried to slow down other things and optimize youtube?
jad594 wroteThanks guys! So I learned a new concept of "throttling" today which is interesting, I am not much of a tech savy I guess I will look into the VPN.

But I have a question, if Youtube is really popular and lots of consumers are on it, why would they throttle it? Wouldnt it be more ideal if they tried to slow down other things and optimize youtube?
they don't care if a website is popular or not, they check their charts and see that youtube is consuming 60% ie of total people consumption, so they throttle it to save bandwith and with that money
That is ironic, I guess because I come from a business background I am use to the theories of shifting focus and value creation to where consumers are demanding the most. Very interesting - thanks again!!
One thing you could try is using HTML5 instead of flash or vice versa and see if that makes a difference.

And yeah, stuff like this is why people are pissed with our ISP's--no consumer protections in this country, because the foxes are running the henhouse.
I had some access to my ISP log of bandwith, more than 60% went to google related IPs, (play store, youtube and those stuff). He throttles all the traffic of the range of IP, I bypassed it easily with a simple vpn. I can provide one for tests if you want. pm me