I have two internet connections - from different ISPs, one through my phone line (old and slow - 20 Mbps) and one from my cable company (new, fiber - 150 Mbps). Now, here's the problem - whenever I use the fast line and try to watch YouTube through this connection, it often craps out. It will not buffer anymore, then pause and often return "Connection to server lost." This does not happen if I switch to the old phone line, but obviously I'd prefer to use just the new connection.
So why does this happen? I suspect it's an issue with the Google Global Caching server that the cable company is using because if I ping YouTube.com, then:
- Through the old line is thinks it's fra02s28-in-f4.1e100.net (173.194.116.132)
- Through the new line it thinks it's waw02s05-in-f14.1e100.net (216.58.209.46)
So what options do I have at this point? Here are the things that crossed my mind, but for each I've got some questions:
The obvious one - use a VPN. This would be most convenient as I could configure it on my router and it would affect all devices, but I don't feel comfortable about this, thought because:
- I'm worried about security, even though now my ISP may see what I do, I'd rather have that than send my credit card information through some proxy, for example.
- I'm worried about ping, I suspect using a VPN may affect it which would suck for online games.
- I'm worried about speed loss, it's running at full speed now with no issues aside from the one YouTube problem.
However, if you KNOW (not think - know for sure) what VPN is super secure, I'm all ears.
Contact my ISP about it. I'd rather avoid that because when they first set it all up, gave me a WiFi password for the router and when I said "got it, will change it ASAP" and heard "you can't do that, you'll have to do it through us", I prefer not to draw any attention to myself as they may discover that I've reset their router to factory settings, created a user account with full access and changed their default passwords ;)
But again - if you know that an ISP could address it and somehow reconfigure their DNS to use a different GGC server, let me know.
Contact Google about it. Given the fact that Google (esp. YouTube) either doesn't have support or they hide it so well that it's clear they don't want to talk to customers, I doubt it will work, but I found some contact emails here: https://peering.google.com/about/contact.html so maybe someone would read my message and check the server that drops my connection... assuming that's actually the server's fault and not my ISPs.
Set up some forwarding system. This is just speculation as I have no clue how or even if this would be possible. Now, as much as I can imagine it being possible to do on a "per device" basis and could work on my PC, I want it to apply to all my devices on the network incl. mobile devices which I can't configure as I could my PC, but again - if you know how this could be done on router level, let me know.
Set up my own DNS. Now that's again crazy talk, but I just Googled "raspberry pi as a dns" and it looks like it could be doable. No idea how... yet, but if anyone has any experience with this thing, let me know so I can at least know if it's worth the time to research and get into this (and find out it's not possible).
So yeah... these are my "first world problems" right now ;) If anyone has any clue how I can in any way do this and connect to a different caching server, let me know.
you could try to use a google public dns. ex 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 I never use the isp auto assigned dns.
About the VPN, while it's true that you have to have some trust that your VPN provider isn't looking at your traffic or anything like that, if you're sending you credit card info in plain text you have much bigger problems. No reputable site would have you input credit card info without using SSL so your VPN provider isn't going to see anything like that.
As far as ping goes you should be able to set it up in your router so that only web traffic goes over the VPN. It depends on your router but all you'd have to do is have port 80 and 443 go over the VPN and everything else go over the regular gateway.
Are you using your ISP's DNS servers? You could try using google or opendns instead. I suppose if you knew which IP you wanted youtube.com and all the other youtube domains to go to your could set up a DNS server to do that, not sure how well that would work though in the long run.
I think that using a VPN is the simplest option.
Thank for the info so far :)
Reg. 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 - that's one of the first things I've done:
Didn't help at all, unfortunately.
Reg. VNPs - of course I wouldn't use my CC on a site that doesn't offer encryption, so you're saying that a VPN literally just passes it through in encrypted form and it won't go encrypted from me to the VPN and then get encrypted by the VPN server? As you see based on this question - networking is not my area of expertise ;)
Reg. port forwarding - how exactly could I set up a VPN here:
and make it work just for these 2 ports?
What does a "tracert youtube.com" look like on the phone line compared to the cable?
perhaps that company is having an issue with a switch somewhere. tracert will show you the ping times to each hop over the path for the traffic.
if you do "ping youtube.com -t -l 1024" does it just keep going or does it start to become unresponsive do the numbers jump a large degree?
Is it only youtube that has issues? Does it matter what quality?
On both connections tracing the path to YouTube shows ping times of less than 20ms and pinging YouTube itself doesn't show any issues so it's not like I can't ping it at certain times or the times increase.
In fact, as I use the YouTube app on my Android tablet while this issue happens, I can still navigate through the app and see comments on videos and other thumbnails load fast, it's just the video that doesn't buffer - that's what made me think that it's not just an issue with connecting to YouTube itself, but their caching server, in particular - the one the cable company uses.
The quality of the video doesn't matter. Of course if this disruption happens You Tube may try to go down to as low as 240p just to buffer more data during the short time it may get some data through.
All other sites work fine, I've had no issues with this connection whatsoever aside just from the YouTube problem. It's nice and fast, although it's "up to 150 Mbps" (of course), it stays consistently between 145-149 Mbps (even at the time the YouTube issue happens).
Works fine, but then... right now YouTube works good in general. This issue doesn't happen all the time, it may work perfectly for 30-40 minutes and then for the next 5-10 minutes it craps out. At the moment, I'm in the "all good" zone ;)
I'm mostly noticing it in the evening (1am - 3am) which is when I'm watching YouTube most often and for a while I though that maybe they are doing maintenance overnight, but it happened to me on the PC during daytime too so this can't be it, probably a coincidence caused by the fact that I almost always watch YT during these times.
When i worked at my cable provider 12am-5am was the maintenance window. possibly they are trying to fix something during that time.
it may also be an issue with people using youtube a lot on your cable run that is probably over sold its bandwidth limit.
You may have to contact the isp to get it fixed, and have them transfer you to advanced internet support not a script reading call center person or send a tech out neither of them will fix this kind of issue.
If you do call the isp and get transferred to a level 2 internet support tech. make sure you have a list of times that it happens, related issues, general internet issue is fine just the video itself doesn't work. ect.
Https uses end to end encryption, so your traffic is encrypted between you and the webserver. When you send traffic through a Vpn it is encrypted between you and the vpn server and then sent out from there to wherever the destination is. The vpn doesn't touch your traffic it just passes it along anything which is encrypted will still be encrypted when it reaches the vpn server. Basically if you can trust everything else between you and a webserver there's no reason not to trust a Vpn provider, anything which should be private should use encryption anyway.
I'm not sure how or if you can do it on that router. I use pfsense and can define which gateway is used as part of the firewall rules, see if there is any option like that in your firewall section, otherwise you might have a look at something like dd-wrt or openwrt.
As an aside, if you set up your own DNS server you're going to need to forward onto another server anyway. You would want to avoid your ISP ones so Google or Opendns would be the way to go, in that case you might as well just connect directly to them.