YouTube and Broadband Signal

MentalMinnie

Can anyone shed some light on this? The hubby reckons that as soon as your BB provider realises you're on YouTube they kill the Internet speed. Granted, we're in Vigin and after a few minutes on YouTube our signal goes kaput, but really? Is he just being a conspirory theorist?!?

Buzby

Virgin National or Cable? By 'signal' do you mean bandwidth or wifi? VM certainly do not restrict normal use of YT, and my TiVo has it as an app and it runs fine.

JenniWR

It is actually very tricky for an ISP to tell real-time what website you're on, only the traffic type you're using. Depending upon how it's being viewed and which ports are open, youtube could appear as either normal web usage, or as streaming, neither of which are usually restricted (since web is the bread-and-butter of the internet, and streaming is time-sensitive, and therefore generally prioritised).

As a n00b to MSE forums, I'm not allowed to post links, but suffice to say it took me under two minutes on the VM homepage to search and locate their traffic management policy. In essence, you get a certain allowance between 10am and 3pm, and again between 4pm and 9pm, and if you use all of it, you're slowed down by 50% (your allowance depends upon the speed package you've pick - M 10Mbps, M/L 20Mbps, XL 30Mbps etc). For example, the 100Mbps package which I'm on allows me 20GB download 10am-3pm, and 10GB 4pm-9pm. If I exceed these, I'm slowed to 50Mbps. Crude, but apparently rather effective.