AT&T Fiber 1000 Throttling Streaming

[cliberti]

So, Many are reporting that AT&T is throttling video with some proof on Fiber 1000. This is applying to apple tv, YouTube, Hulu, etc. Do you have full control of what happens to data packets on lines that you lease? Is there any throttling happening to your customers?

The way someone described it is they were working with a Hulu engineer and what they uncovered is in AT&T Fiber 1000 that their speeds would look fine until 5 minutes after starting a stream where it would drop from 900mbps to 5mbps making the stream buffer. Then, if he connected through a VPN this issue would disappear.

I have seen this myself but I think it is because of my extender that connects my living room to the office so do not think it is happening at the ISP level.

Thanks.

[bobrk]

My service has been amazing. The only thing that has buffered was Hulu's Live TV product on live sports. Everything else we do on this fiber goes as fast as the server sends it.

I'm using the eero that Sonic rents, and for DNS, I'm using OpenDNS name servers.

[sigg]

So, Many are reporting that AT&T is throttling video with some proof on Fiber 1000. This is applying to apple tv, YouTube, Hulu, etc. Do you have full control of what happens to data packets on lines that you lease? Is there any throttling happening to your customers?

The way someone described it is they were working with a Hulu engineer and what they uncovered is in AT&T Fiber 1000 that their speeds would look fine until 5 minutes after starting a stream where it would drop from 900mbps to 5mbps making the stream buffer. Then, if he connected through a VPN this issue would disappear.

I have seen this myself but I think it is because of my extender that connects my living room to the office so do not think it is happening at the ISP level.

Thanks.

Hi cliberti,

If you are using the router/gateway that AT&T has provided, then it's likely the poor streaming performance you see is due to sub-optimal routing from DNS server selection. The DNS servers that AT&T injects to your router may not be located near you, so when you perform a DNS lookup for a given stream, the traffic may take a sub-optimal path full of congestion, packet loss, etc. I set DNS servers that were as close to my location as possible (as few hops as possible), so I choose Level-3 at 4.2.2.2/4.2.2.3 and/or OpenDNS at 208.67.222.222/208.67.220.220. Try a combination of those instead to see if your streaming experience improves.

[badufamily]

how does that explain the change in stream rate?