YouTube being slow (Routing possibilities question)

Other than using a VPN, is there another way of rerouting my connection to YouTube? I have Verizon FiOS with 150/65, so it's not my local connection (Speedtest.net confirmed with different states: Georgia, Minnesota, New York, Washington, etc. Varying speeds throughout, but usually over 80).

I decided to do a Tracert to youtube.com, this resulted in every hop connection being excellent, except for one. The 7th hop was the one killing my connection to YouTube streaming.

Anyways, is there a way to reroute my connection to YouTube without having to use a VPN?

Starius

Posted 2013-04-29T02:09:54.067

Reputation: 121

I have seen the same issue. I have 300/mbit down, but I download at 1MB/sec through youtube servers. I think they must also employ some sort of throttling per connection. I think they want to balance data output via their load balancing servers. – Jonathan – 2015-09-03T16:23:35.120

I think this question would be better off at [su]. You're asking about network routing rather than asking a question about YouTube. – ale – 2013-04-29T02:54:34.743

Answers

ASSUMING that the issue is that hop,

No, in this case a VPN of some sort would be necessary. The route that your data takes to get to its destination is entirely out of your hands. It is chosen as the most efficient or the most direct based on routing protocols handled by your ISP and backbone companies.

The only way you could attempt to have your data take a different route would be to have that data "originate" somewhere else and this almost exclusively requires a VPN of sorts. You can of course do variations on this such as SSH tunneling, proxies, etc. But in essence, your data does need to originate from another source if you hope to bypass that hop.

Will.Beninger

Posted 2013-04-29T02:09:54.067

Reputation: 1 402

Thank you very much sir. Do you recommend any VPN out there? Preferably one that will not completely destroy my internet speeds. – Starius – 2013-04-29T04:35:44.537

1I've personally used StrongVPN and found it was fast enough to stream video on. (Used for bypassing geographical restrictions) It is paid but very reasonable per month. – Will.Beninger – 2013-04-29T04:38:28.030

One thing you CAN do to speed up youtube transfer speeds, is using a download accelerator (uses multiple connections, for example the open source Free Download Manager) and a browser extension that allows for youtube downloads to get the URI.

However, I should point out, you actually don't want to do a tracert to youtube.com. The actual video addresses are stored at something like r19---sn-a5m7zned.googlevideo.com (that's just an example for LA, you will need to find the domain nearest you)

If you tracert to youtube.com the best you are determining is how to speed up the actual HTML website

Keep in mind that you don't want to stream video through browsers anyway. For large 4k videos the overhead is unacceptable. You'll want a native streaming program such as Windows 8 app Hyper for Youtube which runs on native code and not embedded in a website. Also if you MUST do stuff on browser, switch to HTML5 youtube.com/html5 because flash also has a lot of overhead

Jonathan

Posted 2013-04-29T02:09:54.067

Reputation: 1 287