EE Throttling my speeds when i use Youtube?

[SuarLFC]

Hi,

I have been having trouble with my broadband for a little while, i thought it might be because i am using WIFI so had a electrician come out and fit ethernet cables to each room. I am still having issues, mainly with Youtube where it looks to be that my speeds are being throttled when it notices i'm streaming video from Youtube. I am paying for 900MBs but when i use the 'Stats for nerds' on Youtube to show my connection speeds it is around 3000kbps, which means it will only load 480p. If i turn on my VPN and essentially hide my traffic from EE my speeds immediately fly up to 500,000kbps+, this is very frustrating as i shouldn't need to run a VPN and the VPN is then causing connection errors on other websites making me refresh the page.

If this is not EE throttling what is causing this? I have tried resetting the BT fibre box, the EE modem, i have replaced the WIFI with ethernet, i have tried changing the DNS to both Google or Cloudfare to see if this fixes and nothing works.

EPDATE: I have just removed the ethernet and used WIFI and this is no longer happening on WIFI, is this something wrong with out the modem or my set up and the way its routing through a hardwired connection? Because it works fine with a VPN on wired

  

[Aletaz]

Interestingly I thought the issue resolved as when I used Youtube at a non-peak time there was no buffering issue, but similar to another user this seems to be a consistent issue at about 7pm onwards

Took the advice and checked out the BT forum, one of the suggestions was to check if the problem was resolved via VPN. So I downloaded Proton and tried that, which resolved the issue.

so as it stands, using EE WiFi causes issues but if at the same time of day and on the same device I switch on encrypted data via VPN (e.g EE can’t see the usage to identify it to throttle) or switching to mobile data on O2 it immediately removes the buffering issue

I think that points to intentional throttling via EE or it’s a technical routing issue… either isn’t great 

[tyencyu]

It's definitely gotten worse as peak time comes on

I don't think it's intentional throttling, I am by no means an expert but doing some research I think it's a bad Google Global Cache (GGC) on the BT Infrastructure, When you use a VPN you're connecting to a server elsewhere, which would have cache traffic served via a GGC node closer to that server, but when you turn the VPN off and refresh, you're routed back through the one closest to you again. 

Which would need someone from BT to investigate. It's affecting BT, EE and PlusNet, who share the same infrastructure.

[jak26]

Although many are seeing issues there's such a range of issues reported - such as buffering or slow loading - that nothing 'points to' intentional throttling - why would they? the bandwidth needed for yt streaming is small. Switching to VPN or mobile data changes the path taken of course but as sensible posts suggest issues with certain sites are likely technical such as - CDN, peering, routing, etc not throttling, not deliberate

Of course there will be things that are EE specific - but hopefully with enough feedback will get improved.

Coming from PN with its simpler router and no IPv6 the time taken for a device such as PC to get Internet connection is now much longer - 10 secs + on each wake - and I've had LAN device discovery issues - e.g. delay before a NAS shows up in file explorer. 

There's already a router connected so it's not the idea of needing something to keep ports alive, and IPv4 static addressing isn't helping either, maybe with IPv6 there's more device and DNS addresses to configure on connection and there could be hub issues they need to sort out.

[Ewan15]

My family use YouTube in the evenings and we are not experiencing the buffering issue, however my router (EE Pro) is configured to use Quad 9 for DNS

[tyencyu]

It's likely because it's believed to be a regional issue, It's been dug into in depth on both Reddit and the BT Forum, There's a specific common GGC node that pretty much everyone reporting the issue has shared (***---sn-cu-cime7). The current thought is that i is a Google Global Cache server that BT operates within its network (you can find this by doing an nslookup).

Somebody ran some packet captures and identified that those specific GGC nodes look to have a highly restricted initcwnd parameter that limits connections down to something like 2mb rather than redirecting the end user to a healthier node it keeps them on that highly restricted one which causes buffering and auto negotiates to lower resolutions. Seems to be affecting some people in the North West / North Wales / Midlands. This is why using a VPN sidesteps the problem, because you end up on a GGC node other than the affected one that isn't misconfigured.

It's not a DNS problem and won't be mitigated by changing your router. BT need to investigate and I believe its been referred to the correct team via the BT Forum now

[tyencyu]

Interestingly checking on it now at what was the start of peak time yesterday, it currently  looks like they've taken the bad node out or corrected it. I'm now connecting to rr4---sn-cu-c9i6 routinely which doesn't have the same issue.

Edit, They've confirmed over on the BT Forum that they'd identified 2 misbehaving caches and have taken them out for investigation. You should now fail over to other caches and this should start to improve. 

[jak26]

I'm seeing an issue like this now - 4K HDR won't play and YouTube (PC and TV apps) stats reports a sub 1Mb/s YouTube  connection. The speed test in other apps /PC etc are fine,

Ah - theres a lot of reports on downdetector so its likely everyone affected this time 

[Christopher_G]

Hi @jak26 

Welcome to the community.

If you're still having problems this morning, I recommend speaking with our technical support team so that they can run through some tests with you, to try and get to the bottom of it.

Chris