Throttled YouTube and Video Streaming Speeds – Request for Assistance

[WelshY1987]

Hi all,

I’m having a strange issue with my Sky broadband and wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same.

When I watch YouTube , playback is really slow — constant buffering, or stuck in 144p/240p quality. the stats for nerds show speed tests during this and only get about 4 Mbps when streaming videos.

However, if I turn on a VPN, the speed jumps massively — I get over 115 Mbps instantly, and YouTube works perfectly at 1080p or even 8K.

This makes me think Sky is throttling or traffic shaping certain types of video traffic. I'm using a wired connection, my PC is fine, and general browsing or downloads are fast without VPN. It's just streaming and surfing  that suffers.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Is there a fix?
Is Sky known to throttle YouTube during peak hours?

Thanks in advance for any help or insight.

— Mark

[Highlinder]

@WelshY1987  Black or white router from Sky? Are you on a FTTC or full fibre broadband?

[WelshY1987]

Black router Full Fibre sky 500 broaband 

[Highlinder]

@WelshY1987  Are you using the VPN to view YouTube at this time of night? These days there is no need to throttle speeds that is something I have not seen going on for well over 10 years and even then I was with BT at the time this was happening.

[WelshY1987]

Yes, but soon as i connect Proton vpn and refesh the issue goes away and i can see under nerds stats the increase in connection speed same as facebook it loads slow and pages take ages but soon as i connect via vpn issue goes away only notce with facebook and youtube speed test and ping look good

[WelshY1987]

Also wireless streams are effected like fire tv ITV player, Bbc Iplayer same issue there as soon as a vopn is connect problem goes away

[WelshY1987 · Accepted solution]

*Fixed* after restarting hub that provided by openreach and uninstalling eathernet drivers and reinstalling the issue fixed it's self I guess the fire tv issue must just be releated to wifi and being a old device.