[tkone]

I live in Seattle and use Centurylink and experience none of this. My children watch youtube all evening with no degradation of quality, even while my wife and I watch netflix. I have never experienced slowness with centurylink -- I wonder if there is some bad hop that the vpn is avoiding?

[darkengine]

I notice some videos play fine at 1080p60, while others auto-throttle down to 360p. I wonder if this indicates that YouTube videos can be stored on a variety of datacenters (with a variety of paths between them and CenturyLink). Google's video quality report also rates CenturyLink in Seattle as "standard definition" [1]. I don't have Netflix, but I just scored 910 Mbps on fast.com (Netflix's speed test), so I think their connection to Netflix must be good.

A quick Google search reveals a thread of similar stories: https://www.reddit.com/r/centurylink/comments/5y1jzy/does_ce...

[1] https://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/

[jerf]

I don't have an in to Google, but a bit of fairly simple logic would suggest that while YouTube presumably puts the short tail of popular videos on all nodes, the long tail will be much more distributed and less replicated; the costs inevitably force them that way. I can't prove it but as a long-tail consumer myself I believe I've witnessed some videos getting pulled in from some slow long-term storage before, things like conference videos from five years ago in the low hundreds of views.