Is TelstraClear sitting on its YouTube problem?
Using some "techniques" that work with other ISPs which cache YouTube content locally won't help - refreshing the page on your browser for example won't get a "local" version from your ISP, since TelstraClear doesn't seem to offer this kind of service.
This has been happening for about a month now, and it seems to affect both cable modem and DSL customers. I have seen reports of this on Geekzone (1, 2) and from people following me on Twitter who confirmed the same affecting them.
I've heard a rumour that TelstraClear is investigating this, but no official confirmation was received. I've tried contacting TelstraClear's spokesperson via email, but received no reply.
It seems only YouTube is being affected, and overall I am quite happy with how other services perform on TelstraClear's network (in my case the cable modem service).
Don't worry visiting their status page. This issue is not recognised by the company. And calling their help desk will get through someone that will imply the problem is on your side (and just forcing the customer to move away).
UPDATE: the official TelstraClear response to this issue is "We intend to speak with Google to try and improve the experience of our customers since their move to more HD content."
That's it. No problem acknowledgement, no explanation.
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Broadband in New Zealand according to OECD
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Comment by Johnk, on 15-Dec-2009 19:08
yeah i have noticed this as well, no probs watching vids from dailymotion, or anywhere else.just youtube,painfully long load times. i hope they sort it out. im otherwise also happy
Comment by Johnk, on 15-Dec-2009 19:09
yeah i have noticed this as well, no probs watching vids from dailymotion, or anywhere else.just youtube,painfully long load times. i hope they sort it out. im otherwise also happy
Comment by Mr K, on 15-Dec-2009 19:30
I've just left TelstraClear .. it's not just YouTube it affects - but also Apple.com/trailers and a few other places. YouTube is the worst.
I kicked up a fuss on Twitter - I got some responses & they tried to fix it. But after getting it to work for 1 day - it went back to the issue and I left ... have gone to Orcon.
No ISP is perfect, I'm having some patchy Apple.Com downloads with Orcon - but in general I have to say it's a smoother experience (oh and faster as I went from DSL to DSL2)
Comment by bcourtney, on 15-Dec-2009 20:07
Absolutely IS an issue. I have TCL cable (10mbps download) and it's shocking regardless of whether I connect via network cable to the router or wirelessly.
I have a 4mbps Citylink connection at work as well as a 2mbps NZ Wireless connection and neither have the same issue as I do at home (and the NZ Wireless connection is pretty crap for most things in general)
Comment by Jason, on 15-Dec-2009 20:42
I am definitely having the problems too. It's at the point that I start the video, pause it and then come back to it later.
Comment by Davos, on 15-Dec-2009 21:02
Yes this has been an ongoing issue for quite some time now. I've practically given up using Youtube from home.
Apart from this I'm happy with the TCL service (with the exception of the status page which would read green amidst nuclear armageddon) however I am disappointed that TCL have little to say about it. Olof contributed early on in the geekzone thread, but the silence has been deafening of late.
Perhaps the issue is outside TCL's control, but talking to us about it certainly isn't.
Comment by stuartm, on 15-Dec-2009 21:21
Yes, I have the same issues on my TCL 10mbps cable connection - constant buffering.
If you're right about Ralphski working for TelstraClear then that's pretty embarrassing for them: blatantly denying the issue while everyone I know on TCL cable is having issues.
Comment by jmacg, on 15-Dec-2009 21:30
I have the same buffering problem on YouTube as everyone else with my TelstraClear cable service. However, I have to say that my Vodafone DSL at work is no better with YouTube.
Comment by James Pole, on 15-Dec-2009 21:40
Xnet has (or had -- I'm no longer a customer) the same issues due to capacity constraints on their international links. Wonder if TCL suffering from capacity issues on their international links?
Comment by James, on 15-Dec-2009 22:11
Comes and goes. Sometimes you strike it rich and the videos sream well, far too often though, buffer pause and stutter. Very annoying if you're watching music videos!
I reckon T/Clear is using some hairy bandwidth management on youtube servers, and it stinks.
Comment by Jonno, on 15-Dec-2009 22:50
Here here! Happens to me on cable and a friend on dsl. We are both with telstraclear in christchurch.
My 10 megabit cable connection should not be having these problems!
Bloody annoying.
Comment by chakkaradeep, on 15-Dec-2009 22:53
Yep, me too have the same issue. YouTube videos takes longer to play than any other video service (like dailymotion).
Comment by paradoxsm, on 15-Dec-2009 23:02
After ralphski's loaded comment, I'd be looking at switching providers. Things like that don't keep me around for long.
I had an opposite issue today, with a totally different ISP. When streaming from the overseas Youtube servers, identified as simply "cache" it worked fine but wachting the version that had been locally cached "lscache" resulted is a very similar to telstraclear cable experience of the other week.
Same went for "popular" videos, they were buffering endlessly. Perhaps the local cache is sucking all the bandwidth leving very little on the pipe for other users, it's a weird perfomance issue!
Hang-on, I'm sitting here off a cable connection, I'll test it and re-post.
Comment by paradoxsm, on 15-Dec-2009 23:21
Yes definately slow and buffering. Strangely it seem to be doing the same "lscache" as my home connection, I don't have wireshark on here so cannot do a proper analysis but intersting netherless.
With standard flv, videos seem to play, just
With MP4 selected "hq" or format 18 most clips buffer.
Downloads at approx 35KB (KiloBYTES) per second, not quite quick enough for realtime playback
Tim Finn - Fraction too much friction as an example, an old NZ song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7xMm_1U1XI&fmt=18
v7.cache8.c.youtube.com
v23.lscache8.c.youtube.com
Both pre-cached and post-cached (is it cached?) download at the same hopeless speeds.
Weird as post-cached fly though on my Big Time ADSL connection at at good 350KB/s (after I removed the 7 Master sockets wired-as-2-wire sockets which were slaying my connection sync speed to all of 1Mbit)
Comment by eXDee, on 16-Dec-2009 00:52
This has been happening for me for well over a month.
I've got into the habit of buffering videos in another tab while i continue browsing as i used to back 7 years ago on 256k.
Viewing a variety of videos, im getting the average speed of 52kB/s. Viewing a HD video gives me twice that speed.
And this is at almost 1am.
Putting this through a SSH tunnel to the USA, and im now putting through 80kb/s on a standard quality video.
My maximum speed i can get on downloads 2.25MB/s (18mbit), even internationally.
Comment by Quentin, on 16-Dec-2009 08:01
I get buffeting on tcl cable from tvnz radio NZ and others as well as YouTube. It turns out that these LOCAL content companies all host there content in the USA! Sound like international bandwidth constraints to me. Checking with speedtest site international download is one tenth of local speeds.
Comment by ralphski, on 16-Dec-2009 08:20
For paradoxsm,
Please don't blame me for any choices you decide to make.
Any that opinions that I state in any forums are my own, please remember that.
I said I don't have any problems with youtube from home... which I don't.
When I go to youtube at peak times (5PM-9PM) I pause playback straight away then wait for a partial load of the clip before I hit play again.
However I only have to do that at peak times, the rest of the time it streams instantly without any issues.
Comment by Tinshed, on 16-Dec-2009 08:46
My experience is similar to many others here. Watching YouTube on TelstraClear is a very frustrating experience. For the past month or so it is impossible to watch any clip without buffering, which makes for a very unpleasant experience. Strange thing is, about three months ago, it was working fine for me, and not others, and now it is not working. So some tweaking, or reconfiguration must be going. One can't help be suspicious that there was deliberate "packet shaping" going on somewhere along the line.
Comment by andrewinwlg, on 16-Dec-2009 08:51
I have had youtube issues on vodafone as well, always during peak times. However, even during peak times, I get 500kb to servers in the US, which is more than enough to stream videos.
So it makes me wonder if in fact the problem is on the youtube end. Which makes me wonder how can we diagnose such things?
Comment by mikerussellnz, on 16-Dec-2009 09:02
Main problem I have is that its either buffering all the time or just barely keeping up and so close to buffering, never loads ahead of now, but in that case usually doesn't buffer.
Perhaps they are trying to throttle videos the youtubes bitrate but getting it wrong.
Comment by askelon, on 16-Dec-2009 09:02
It was working fine for me up until a couple of weeks ago. Admittedly my internet habits have changed this month (damned people wanting me to actually work!) but I dont remember it being so bad during peak time as it has lately. Everything else other than youtube seems to run fine so its no big deal with me :)
Comment by muppet, on 16-Dec-2009 09:03
Still a problem for us as well.
Hope it's being looked at!
Comment by ralphski, on 16-Dec-2009 09:40
Having said the above, I've also nownoticed how much slower it is.
I possibly didn't notice so much because I don't spend much time there & when I do go there it's late as I work until 2100.
For what it's worth I have raised this internally now & I'll follow up with Olof.
Comment by James, on 16-Dec-2009 11:56
T/Clear's answer would be believable, if we were actually trying to watch HD content. SD is bad enough, HD is usually pointless to even try!
Comment by lurker, on 16-Dec-2009 12:32
What on earth can Google do about this? I hope they tell TCL to sort their sh out.
Comment by Behodar, on 16-Dec-2009 12:41
I'm yet another user having trouble, both at work and at home. As mentioned by James, SD content is bad enough and I haven't even tried HD!
Comment by andrewinwlg, on 16-Dec-2009 14:49
In telstra clear's defence, has anyone provided empirical evidence that google/youtube are not throttling their speed to NZ from their end?
I would be interested to hear proposals as to how to measure this. Does anyone have a "youtube speed test"? Even if we did, it is still hard to prove which end the speed is being throttled from. Any ideas?
Comment by Zach, on 16-Dec-2009 15:50
+1 annoyed user for abominable youtube streaming.
To get them to load fast enough, I use Hotspot Shield (free VPN).
Or use the bookmarklet to download youtube videos as MP4 files.
Comment by sammcj, on 17-Dec-2009 12:12
Hello!
Glad I found this page, for the past year I've been having major problems with Telstra cable.
I recently logged a job with Telstra, they got me to run some MTR tests (I even had them running over night on a 15min cron job) etc...
I've had problems with their DNS for years 203.96.152.4/12 are the most unreliable DNS server's I've seen.
Basicly they just told me "Youtube is simply like that, let me know when the MTR is bad"
---
Hello,
I'm not happy with that response, Youtube is not 'simply like that'. We pay a premium for Telstra cable and it should be able to preform at least as reliably as other providers DSL connections.
After forwarding Telstra's reply on to a friend who is a network contractor here in Christchurch he had the following to say:
"Perhaps he might like to look at:
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/freitasm/7002
FYI I can watch youtube HQ without buffering on my Snap connection, and they don't cache youtube so it is definitely not a YouTube problem
I also tried a YouTube video at another client's yesterday on TelstraClear BizNet Gold (basically business version of cable plans). Same problem as you're having.
Ross"
Please let me know what steps Telstra is taking on this matter as it appears to be affecting many people.
-Sam.
----
Hello Sam,
YouTube is simply like that of late. It's a known issue worldwide and has been for several months.
Just shoot through some mtr results to us when they look bad.
If you have any further queries or to update this response please visit “My Stuff” within the Online Help section at www.telstraclear.co.nz/go/onlinehelp.
---
UPDATE:
It's 5.30PM and the some pages are almost unusable, youtube is so slow that it simply doesn't work.
Speedtest.net gave me a decent score of 9.25Mbps Down and 2.08Mbps Up.
Pingtest.net gave me a ping of 168ms which is much higher than the usual 30ms we get, only 2ms jitter and no packet loss.
I've attached a text document where a scheduled a cron job to run mtr every 15mins last night but it seemed fine the whole time, again keep in mind that we have days where the performance is much worse than today.
Comment by sammcj, on 17-Dec-2009 12:13
Hello!
Glad I found this page, for the past year I've been having major problems with Telstra cable.
I recently logged a job with Telstra, they got me to run some MTR tests (I even had them running over night on a 15min cron job) etc...
I've had problems with their DNS for years 203.96.152.4/12 are the most unreliable DNS server's I've seen.
Basicly they just told me "Youtube is simply like that, let me know when the MTR is bad"
---
Hello,
I'm not happy with that response, Youtube is not 'simply like that'. We pay a premium for Telstra cable and it should be able to preform at least as reliably as other providers DSL connections.
After forwarding Telstra's reply on to a friend who is a network contractor here in Christchurch he had the following to say:
"Perhaps he might like to look at:
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/freitasm/7002
FYI I can watch youtube HQ without buffering on my Snap connection, and they don't cache youtube so it is definitely not a YouTube problem
I also tried a YouTube video at another client's yesterday on TelstraClear BizNet Gold (basically business version of cable plans). Same problem as you're having.
Ross"
Please let me know what steps Telstra is taking on this matter as it appears to be affecting many people.
-Sam.
----
Hello Sam,
YouTube is simply like that of late. It's a known issue worldwide and has been for several months.
Just shoot through some mtr results to us when they look bad.
If you have any further queries or to update this response please visit “My Stuff” within the Online Help section at www.telstraclear.co.nz/go/onlinehelp.
---
UPDATE:
It's 5.30PM and the some pages are almost unusable, youtube is so slow that it simply doesn't work.
Speedtest.net gave me a decent score of 9.25Mbps Down and 2.08Mbps Up.
Pingtest.net gave me a ping of 168ms which is much higher than the usual 30ms we get, only 2ms jitter and no packet loss.
I've attached a text document where a scheduled a cron job to run mtr every 15mins last night but it seemed fine the whole time, again keep in mind that we have days where the performance is much worse than today.
Comment by sammcj, on 17-Dec-2009 12:24
Yup I am, it's a lot better but paradise still needs to fix this issue; especially if they're still handing out 203.96.152.4/12 to people!
Hasn't helped youtube and I noticed ajax / refresh intensive websites i.e. facebook (you can tell im not a web guy!) seem to be very unreliable on paradise, weird page time outs etc... happens on all the computer on our network.
Comment by sammcj, on 17-Dec-2009 12:25
Yup I am, it's a lot better but paradise still needs to fix this issue; especially if they're still handing out 203.96.152.4/12 to people!
Hasn't helped youtube and I noticed ajax / refresh intensive websites i.e. facebook (you can tell im not a web guy!) seem to be very unreliable on paradise, weird page time outs etc... happens on all the computer on our network.
Comment by sammcj, on 17-Dec-2009 12:26
no idea why those posts doubled up!
Comment by mike, on 18-Dec-2009 09:49
its faster to just watch it on the iPhone using 3g that stream and buffer repeatedly on TelstraClear
Comment by markE, on 18-Dec-2009 15:27
I also have this issue but I'm always to lazy to complain. My kids hate it the most when they're trying to watch The Wiggles sort TC.
Comment by WellingtonBoy, on 18-Dec-2009 19:14
YouTube streaming performance has been terrible for a few months. This is evident from the comments above, plus the almost 7000 people who have viewed the TelstraClear / YouTube thread on GeekZone.co.nz.
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=44&topicid=41057
On that forum, TCL acknowldged they made some changes -- but didn't explain what they've done. I would be more tolerant if TCL openly explained the situation, but instead they hide the widespread problem from their Service Status page and choose not to communicate honestly to their impacted customers.
Do NOT sign up for TCL Broadband if you use YouTube.
Comment by Steven Ashley, on 19-Dec-2009 15:54
I too am experiencing the same very frustrating problem. I am on the LightSpeed 80G plan (10Mbps / 2Mbps) in Riccarton, Christchurch.
A few months back things were good. Standard definition videos began playing immediately and were completely downloaded by the time I had watched %20. High definition videos also played without stopping to buffer.
Lately, standard definition clips seem to download at about the same speed as they play (buffering every 30 or so seconds for 2 or 3 seconds). HD clips seem to download at about the same rate; For every 2 seconds of play-time I have to buffer for about 4 seconds.
Downloads from other sites (Steam, Impulse, etc) run at 1200kb/s or so. I would really like to see this fixed or put back to how it was.
I have similar problems at work (also using TCL).
Comment by chiefie, on 23-Dec-2009 10:50
Okay... interestingly... my YouTube experience seems to have improved. I was playing the HQ (mp4), so far haven't checked th HQ (720p) and HQ (1080p) video clips yet.
Has TelstraClear made some changes on their end??
Comment by Tim, on 31-Jan-2010 15:03
Is the You Tube "buffering" still an issue for TelstraClear customers??
Has TelstraClear done anything to rectify the problem or responded in any useful way via email to anyone?
Comment by Cameron, on 11-Feb-2010 20:48
The YouTube problem is so bad that I want to leave TelstraClear. They need to fix this, before they lose ALL their customers.
If I switch to OpenDNS or GoogleDNS etc, the problem no longer exists, so the issue is with TelstraClear's DNS. However, switching DNS servers provides new problems, like many sites failing to load due to their GeoLoading practices... so, while changing DNS servers fixes YouTube, it breaks most of the other website's many people frequent. Basically... TelstraClear need to FIX THIS PROBLEM NOW!
Comment by mattbush, on 26-Feb-2010 08:08
TCL are in fact treating us the same as they did with the ARP issue in Wellington a year or so ago...denial.
I believe the issue has got worse and the responses from helpdesk are a joke.
Has anyone got the CEO's email address?
Comment by sparkiwi, on 27-Feb-2010 13:06
Could it be even remotely possible that this is not a fault but a method TCL might use to manage their overall bandwidth?
Comment by shylo, on 16-Mar-2010 10:12
No - YouTube perfomance is not a side-effect of TCL's bandwidth management
No - it's not a Paradise DNS related problem.
Yes - it's a problem between TelstraClear and Google
Yes - TCL is currently talking with Google to resolve the issue
Yes - the responses from Helpdesk would appear to be a joke as they have nothing to do with international routing, peering or caching. They're there to tell people to reboot their modems and unplug their faxes.
The quick fix is to buy the album or DVD. if you keep pilfering Tim Finn's music online, then he's going to have to go get a job doing jingles for toothpaste companies and not have the time to write any more music for you.
Comment by shylo, on 16-Mar-2010 10:19
...or - alternatively - get a torrent client; steal the content proper; save yourself the bandwidth of repeatedly streaming the same piece of proprietry material.
Comment by Dan, on 4-Aug-2010 23:51
Hey guys.. I've definitely noticed a performance drop in youtube (coming back from Sydney a month or two back( - Am connected with Slingshot (close to exchange in central Wellington) with an approx 18mbit connection.. It Seems the bandwidth/caching for youtube in this country just isn't all that great. But at times ok.
Can anyone shed some light on how the infrastructure/backbone of youtube operates in different countries?
cheers, dan
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Comment by ralphski, on 15-Dec-2009 19:03
I disagree!
I'm on TCL cable at home, it's wireless within my house & I have never had a problem with youtube!
I had more of a problem loading this page because of all the embeded stuff that's really slow.