Very odd twitch.tv and general internet stuttering

I live in Lithuania, I have CGates ISP with 100 mbits/s connection. There shouldn't be any throttling from the provider's side. I don't believe there is. Steam downloads peaks at 9.3 MB/s
I sent a support ticket to the staff of Twitch. Got no response after a month now.

Here's a couple of facts:

  • When I connect directly to the Ethernet cable that comes out of the shielding, I have zero issues, Twitch loads as it did before this whole nonsense.
  • Tried three routers, all of them result in the same output of buffering streams.
  • When I turn on CyberGhost 5 VPN (free) on, open up a stream, let it run and it buffers. Then switch off VPN while the stream is still open, it plays with no issues.
  • Pinging 8.8.8.8 had 150 ping now it has 25. While pinging google.com sometimes takes time to "connect" for a few seconds, then it shows <1ms.
  • Tried switching DNS servers from OpenDNS to Google's and vice versa, literally no difference in performance.

Does anyone have any idea how I could fix this? It happened seemingly out of the blue, then it got back to being normal, then it went bad again. I can provide videos and pictures of this if you need.
Cheers.

Hi OneElkCrew.
What are the make and models of the routers you have tried?

Quite new that I'm using right now: 300M Wireless N TL-WR841N / TL-WR841ND
Also tried with: Asus WL-520GC and Intellinet 150N

Twitch sucks. Plain and simple. I have 100 down too here in Ireland and twitch will buffer, drop frames, stutter and fail to load. Twitch is just a terrible service.

That said looking to the issue is a good idea still.

@gnunard I know that name from somewhere...

Looks like all three routers are quite lowend and less than 32mb ram.
On the TL-WR841N and on WL-520GC you could install DD-WRT and that would probably help but really from my own experiance I would recommend you to try a more high end router. It doesnt have to be expensive and they have a tendency to last for years. After Cisco sold Linksys to Belkin the "old" Cisco Linksys routers are really cheap and fantastically stable. Corporate och government Spying aside. EA6300 is a good choice.

If you have an old computer laying around you could install pfSense on it and use that as the best router you could get, and cheapest. There is nothing like DIY.


@Zibob Hey Bruh!!

@gnunard But I hadn't any problems prior? You missed my points about the VPN switching. It might be a DNS error.
My friend is watching Source quality with the same connection and router.

@OneElkCrew Yeah, maybe I did. If your friend is using your router. Not only the same make and model but your physical router then yes. I was probably wrong. Sorry.
But if its the same make and model but not physically your router it still seams to me to be a ram or a QoS problem.
You said (paraphrase): No router no problems, Mo router mo problems
Which lead me to believe that this is a router problem. Well well. I sincerely hope that your problem is fixed soon. Good luck my friend.

It is probably not throttling, but have you even contacted your provider to have them see if there is an issue on their end? Could be issues with their lines. Might as well start with the source rather than further down the chain.

ISP>Modem>Router>Your PC

The problem not related to me. Twitch bottlenecks your connection, because they're too lazy to upgrade their shit.
I looked up and tried running MPC-HC-based streaming software which I got from tards.net. From there, it loads 1080p60 easily. I don't know how an API-based program differs from their web-based and phone app counterparts.
This explains the VPN getting another IP that is not listed in the bottleneck from Twitch. Everything makes sense. Only the part where I don't use a router. Fuck you, Twitch. Is this even legal?
@Zibob, I recommend you to try the program if you're buffering too. That means we're in the Twitch's buffer list.