For months I've been wondering why the hell my YouTube kept buffering during peak hours.
At first I thought it was my ISP oversubscribing users on high data plans, but it was during the peak periods so that didn't quite make sense. (Australia doesn't quite have truly unlimited internet plans yet.)
So after contacting my ISP and getting some generic responses back like:
- Check your firewall
- Antivirus subscription
- Windows Updates
- No Peer 2 Peer programs running
- Speedtest on another computer
- Isolation test (unplug all telephony devices except for router/modem)
I didn't bother with trying out another modem, because it had been working fine the whole time and the problem was only during certain hours of the day.
Eventually I figured it out. For some time now I had configured my router to use OpenDNS. At first it was not an issue, but I guess something changed and it couldn't cope with the stress.
Disabling the use of OpenDNS and reverting back to the DNS hosts provided by the ISP worked wonders. Once again the videos stream without buffering.
