YouTube is consuming much bandwidth than other operations on my home network

I've a problem that when I'm surfing Facebook, Twitter, stackOverflow or any other site than YouTube, Pages usually takes lot of time to download. While, YouTube don't have any problems. I've a 2 Mbps speed and I have lots of devices connected to my network. When a device opens YouTube, it takes most bandwidth and other devices may take 15 kbps which does not make anything!

I've tried adjusting the QoS on my router and nothing happened. I'll provide screenshots of my router page if you want.

The question is: Is there a way to distribute bandwidth equally between different sites?

My router is tp-link td-w8901n .It is a modem router and unfortunately can't have Tomato or DD-WRT firmware

I have little knowledge in networking, so please try to simplify your answer. Thank you in advance!

Gamal Othman

Posted 2019-02-28T12:21:56.260

Reputation: 109

I highly doubt youtube is taking up all the bandwidth and slowing down the rest. If this were the case, running 2 youtube sites concurrently would create havoc and I'm positive that doesn't happen either. For a site to load slow, that can have many possible causes. For example if DNS is really slow, a site may appear to load slow already, and that's where I think your problem is. – LPChip – 2019-02-28T12:27:21.820

1Do you mean other pages work slowly even when YouTube isn't using bandwidth? – user1686 – 2019-02-28T12:27:26.310

@LPChip The problem happens on the same device. If I tried to open a site and it is very slow or can't open, I open a youtube video and it is showing fine! I started to doubt the ISP as my friend is complaining about the same problem. Can you please tell me what did you meant by the DNS is slow? – Gamal Othman – 2019-02-28T12:35:23.573

@grawity Hmm, I can't judge that! but the devices on the network is a lot. I haven't tested that before. But, on the same device, youtube works perfectly while other sites don't. – Gamal Othman – 2019-02-28T12:37:14.297

Are the affected devices wired via Ethernet? And does the same problem also occur when only one device is connected? That is, when a computer is streaming YouTube, is browsing on the same computer slowed down as well? – user1686 – 2019-02-28T13:50:25.387

Answers

This is not a YouTube problem, it is a content-type problem: Video (no matter if from YouTube, Vimeo or whatever) needs orders of magnitude more bandwidth than typical HTML - in fact: your total bandwidth of 2Mbps is the lower end for a single medium-quality video.

This means: With 2Mbps you can either watch a low-to-medium quality video or do any other usefull work. To solve this problem you must upgrade your internet connection. Target around 4Mbps per device for a smooth experience.

As a workaround you can use the YouTube quality settings to reduce video quality even further, which will free up bandwidth for use by others.

Eugen Rieck

Posted 2019-02-28T12:21:56.260

Reputation: 15 128

1That is right. I know that my total bandwidth is very low and it barely view a youtube video in 460p or 360p if no much other devices working. But if it is a video problem, why Facebook videos don't download as fast as YouTube ones? – Gamal Othman – 2019-02-28T12:42:17.397

1Facebook videos have different compression settings compared to YouTube, they need more bandwidth. – Eugen Rieck – 2019-02-28T12:44:34.290

3I'm not sure if I buy this explanation. Even if one connection "needs" all available bandwidth, TCP has flow control and is supposed to be at least somewhat fair to other connections. I'm regularly downloading large files over HTTP and FTP, and although those transfers naturally consume all possible bandwidth if they can, TCP still makes sure other connections (regular SSH or website navigation) do not stop working. Over ADSL, there isn't even a significant slowdown. – user1686 – 2019-02-28T13:10:49.283

You seem to be explaining away the inverse of what @GamalOthman is observing...? – Attie – 2019-02-28T13:19:28.577

@grawity Can the problem be my tp-link router? I don't know much about protocols, but I think that other firmwares may have more control over bandwidth distribution among devices and sites. – Gamal Othman – 2019-02-28T13:33:09.160

1@GamalOthman: Not sure. It's possible that the router has a bad queue algorithm, but I think that only matters when it's forwarding from a fast connection to a slow one, not vice versa. In other words, for inbound traffic it's your ISP's router, not your home router, which has to stuff all data through the thin pipe. Unfortunately that's where my knowledge already ends regarding this area of networking... – user1686 – 2019-02-28T13:51:00.640

It is definitly NOT a home router problem: The W8901N treats all HTTPS connections the same way - it will not priorize YouTube (or any Video-carrying request) over another. It is rather easy: Your bandwidth available is below your bandwidth needed. – Eugen Rieck – 2019-02-28T16:29:57.427

It's sort of a Youtube problem, because it uses Dynamic Adaptative Streaming over HTTP. There is no way you can, for example, choose a 4K quality, pause the video, set a low bandwidth and let the video buffer for 15 minutes. The buffer would never go to the end of the video anyway, it's not designed like that anymore, it's not the way we want to consume video nowadays. But it's a problem because now it means bandwidth is linked to video quality.

I don't think QoS is going to help, enven though I am not an exprt, because typically video streaming is considered high priority (as opposed to file transfer which is fault tolerant: you can resend a lost packet without causing a glitch), so I assume your QoS setting still prioritizes video streaming over other things.

geoffrey

Posted 2019-02-28T12:21:56.260

Reputation: 43