Bandwidth Limiting Question

Riddle me this Batman!!

Why is it... I have a 1.5 megabit connection to the internet, and I am viewing the most popular video on the most popular video website... Youtube.com... And I am only downloading at say 23 kilobits a second....

Is this youtube throttling my connection speed to youtubes servers according to who they want bandwidth to go to,,,,

Or,,,,

Is it my ISP that is throttling bandwidth to limit certain types of media , for whatever reason,

Or Am I Going Completely Mad over nothing but an every day occurrence ????

Which is the most likely answer??


Is there a tip.. or a trick, to get maximum bandwidth out of Youtube.com ??
I know ATS and BTS minds are all knowing and God-like. So there has to be an answer to how and why youtube is not giving me 1.5 megabits per second!

I need help.

Originally posted by wiredamerican
Riddle me this Batman!!

Why is it... I have a 1.5 megabit connection to the internet, and I am viewing the most popular video on the most popular video website... Youtube.com... And I am only downloading at say 23 kilobits a second....

Is this youtube throttling my connection speed to youtubes servers according to who they want bandwidth to go to,,,,

Or,,,,

Is it my ISP that is throttling bandwidth to limit certain types of media , for whatever reason,

Or Am I Going Completely Mad over nothing but an every day occurrence ????

Which is the most likely answer??


Is there a tip.. or a trick, to get maximum bandwidth out of Youtube.com ??
I know ATS and BTS minds are all knowing and God-like. So there has to be an answer to how and why youtube is not giving me 1.5 megabits per second!

I need help.

Ok, here are the answers....

1) You have a 1.5 meg "CONNECTION" speed, not 1.5 meg download speed.
2) A typical 1.5 connection speed has about 160KBPS download speed.
3) Your ISP "MAY" be throttling you, who is your ISP??? comcast does, ATT may....
4) Your true download spped is a combination of your bandwidth, all the routers between you and the server with data as well as that servers upload speed.
In other words, you may have a 10meg dsl line, but if the server you are downloading from only uploads @ 100K, that will be YOUR max download speed from them.

reply to post by mrmonsoon


I apologize I did not explain my connection with detail.

When I go to a speed website, speed test and I click on the closest city, I am getting 1.47 megabit download, and a .26 megabit upload. Asymmetrical.

My ISP is Century Tel DSL.

The problem is watching HD video's from youtube. If I could harness the full 1.5 megabit down or anything close to it, The videos would stream seamlessly. But it seems to be throttled down to a quarter of this sometimes, which makes me have to manually buffer the stream by pausing for a long while then resuming.

As mrmonsoon stated:

4) Your true download spped is a combination of your bandwidth, all the routers between you and the server with data as well as that servers upload speed. In other words, you may have a 10meg dsl line, but if the server you are downloading from only uploads @ 100K, that will be YOUR max download speed from them.

So you only "get", what the site you are downloading from is "giving' you, no matter what your speed is.

Sucks I know but sites like YouTube can sometimes be very fast, and at others (I'm guessing due to demand) can be very slow.

At times it is slow, I just pause the video and let it completely download, and then play it.

reply to post by tribewilder

Sucks I know but sites like YouTube can sometimes be very fast, and at others (I'm guessing due to demand) can be very slow. At times it is slow, I just pause the video and let it completely download, and then play it.

Good point with the demand. I think that makes sense . They can only give bandwidth to the videos with the most demand. And too much demand maybe slow speeds allotted for the video I am watching.

Thanks for you help.

Odds are its actually youtube at fault, I've noticed that its become increasingly slower lately, I sit on a 16mbit connection that can pull down 500 kb/s or better sustained and I still get plenty of youtube videos that just wont play for crap. I suspect its a demand vs supply issue, people demand more videos and youtube simply can't keep up in terms of bandwidth.

There's probably no active limiting going on. I'd go with demand at the far end.

Other things to consider:

Are you the only computer on your DSL line?
Is your computer downloading anything else?
Is your computer uploading anything else?
Is your computer busy doing several other things?

If you're really interested in the videos, an alternative is to use Firefox and a download helper to just download the videos. VLC is a great viewer.

You could download speedbit video accelerator.

I use it and it seems to help.

You can't beat the price either.

Its free.

Speedbit video accelerator

We get throttled pretty bad between 4pm and 11pm with bt, can be quite annoying sometimes!