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Comment by darkengine | Hacker News Reader

I've been fighting dreadful peering between CenturyLink and a variety of endpoints. I can saturate my gigabit connection on speedtest.net with a directly-peered test host, but YouTube videos at peak times of day buffer at 720p, and downloading from any USA OpenBSD mirror (of which there are only a few, and none in Seattle) nets me about 4mbps, compared to 450mbps or so I can get on a Comcast connection.

What's funny is that using a VPN or tunnel to which CL has a good connection resolves the issue, because the VPN/tunnel host has better peering than CL does.

The difference between Panic's anecdote and mine, is that CenturyLink support won't even acknowledge the issue exists.

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I live in Seattle and use Centurylink and experience none of this. My children watch youtube all evening with no degradation of quality, even while my wife and I watch netflix. I have never experienced slowness with centurylink -- I wonder if there is some bad hop that the vpn is avoiding?

I notice some videos play fine at 1080p60, while others auto-throttle down to 360p. I wonder if this indicates that YouTube videos can be stored on a variety of datacenters (with a variety of paths between them and CenturyLink). Google's video quality report also rates CenturyLink in Seattle as "standard definition" [1]. I don't have Netflix, but I just scored 910 Mbps on fast.com (Netflix's speed test), so I think their connection to Netflix must be good.

A quick Google search reveals a thread of similar stories: https://www.reddit.com/r/centurylink/comments/5y1jzy/does_ce...

[1] https://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/

I don't have an in to Google, but a bit of fairly simple logic would suggest that while YouTube presumably puts the short tail of popular videos on all nodes, the long tail will be much more distributed and less replicated; the costs inevitably force them that way. I can't prove it but as a long-tail consumer myself I believe I've witnessed some videos getting pulled in from some slow long-term storage before, things like conference videos from five years ago in the low hundreds of views.

Many US ISPs have inadequate peering with YouTube and Netflix. I had the same issue with TWC and I've seen reports of it with other providers.

One thing to try is using different DNS servers. That may give you a different server with less traffic. If that doesn't work a VPN, as you mentioned, will.

Try restructuring your body as a corporation.

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