Why can video streaming sites not leverage my 100 MBit LAN-speed?

Question

I am a bit confused about what is slowing down my network and I hope it is correct to ask here and not at "webapps.sx.com", because my issue is not only one with YouTube, but basically many video sites.

I cannot understand how I, living in Seoul (South Korea), sporting a 100 Mbit LAN connection, have problems with content buffering and streaming? What I noticed is, when I use a advanced Download-Manager like jDownloader or DownThemAll or even a standard download manager, an e.g. YouTube video downloads pretty quickly - and I always download them in 720p.

But when I try to stream the same video - embedded on a site or directly on YT - it does buffer forever and loses all their progress (wtf??) when I go from the "small preview" to fullscreen mode! And all that is usually in 360 or 480p, not 720p! (I never watch in 720p because it is absolutely impossible.) Vimeo is a bit better, the only video site I noticed performs better. I had the same issue already back in Germany with a 30-33 Mbit LAN connection. This is especially confusing as the download speed for a YT video normally reaches 2-2,5 MB/second in "jDownloader" (otherwise I didn't measure), so that should be enough when it'd buffer with the same speed. Why is this not the case, is there a technical reason?

Why can't even Google / YouTube - seemingly - provide a fast enough buffering / streaming experience, what is the problem? Is it my PC / hardware? My laptop sports a Intel DualCore i7 (2010 generation) with 6 GB of RAM and always use the most recent Google Chrome browser and Adobe Flash Update.

Attached you find a most recent speedtest.net result: .

What is going on there?

Answer 1

You may also want to consider your location; East Asia - even though South Korea is very well connected internally and within the region, its links externally to the west are much poorer and typically are very overloaded (Recent boom is computer ownership and speed of residential connections is not matched with the backbone capability).

Additionally, while Google does have data centers in the region; the cost of hosting when compared to the west is still significantly higher (they will be getting charged arms and legs for bandwidth) meaning the local capability might not meet the demand, leading to other bottlenecks (or you may be load balanced to a more western server, bringing us back to point 1). Note that this is speculative as Google do not release figure on their infrastructure, and quite often hide the fact that certain locations even exist.

Answer 2

This problem is caused due the fact that 100mbit is the speed of you local home network, (LAN = Local Area Network) and not of your internet connection Judging from your download rates 2-2,5mb/s, you seem to have ~20mbit internet connection. Also, you do not know how broad the connection to sites like youtube really is.

No, it has nothing to do with your hardware, if your car runs out of gas, you do not blame the engine for that, right?

Addition

The cause of the buffering problem is, when you change to fullscreen mode, usually the player automatically detects the larger screen size and tries to load the video in a more suitable resolution. Of course, the whole previously buffered progress is worthless at this point. I suggest you to start buffering, then go directly to fullscreen mode and switch back to normal, most players will load the higher resolution after this and won't go back to the lower resolution video.

If you still face buffering problems after trying this, you should contact the individual hoster for further service. You may also check the connection bandwith for each individual connection to make sure that there is no connection issue with the host.

Addition 2

Since your bandwidth seems to be more then enough for streaming, please note that your bandwidth is not the streamhosters bandwidth. In your case, the buffering speed depends on the hosts bandwidth and most video hosts are heavily occupied (and giving premium users higher priority, if there are premium users), so this problem cannot be fixed by yourself.