Idk whether its a routing issue or a bandwidth cap issue but with ATT Uverse youtube is constantly buffer with the video quality set to 720p. Regular speed tests show reliable 12Mb/3Mb bandwidth which should be well enough to stream a 720p video.
This happens no matter what other bandwidth is being used by other applications or devices. I've actually shut down everything in my house and used the desktop on cat5 to see if it was wireless issues or anything, but the entire rest of the web is snappy and responsive except for HD YouTube.
Thanks AT&T-- the two hundred and forty goddamned dollars a month I'm paying you should defray the cost of the configuration of your service to flirt with the very line of net neutrality.
Dear god please Google Fiber come to Madison.
The only thing that could be causing this is if:
1) YouTube's servers can't push the 1080p video out fast enough. (Very doubtful)
2) U Verse hasn't invested in a capable enough link to YouTube's servers. (Possible, but even a 240p video loads faster than a 1080p video. If it was purely a connection issue then 240p and 1080p videos should load at the same slow speed.)
3) They are purposefully throttling HD YouTube videos to ensure that more bandwidth is available for other things. (I'd say this is most likely.)
Either way some sort of unprofessional and/or shady thing is happening with U Verse and HD YouTube videos.
I'm pretty sure it's Youtube and not our ISPs.
A workaround is to use a ipv6 tunnel. Youtube was literally 5 times faster when my tunnel from SixXs was active.
edit: It appears that the 173.194.55.0/24 and the 206.111.0.0/16 range belongs to Google. Someone revealed that YouTube video requests were utilizing intentional bandwidth throttling that is actually built into their (YouTube) system. Once these ranges are blocked, YouTube's player logic will fall back to Google's datacenters and stream at beautiful speeds.
sudo ipfw add reject src-ip 173.194.55.0/24 in
sudo ipfw add reject src-ip 206.111.0.0/16 in