Don’t Clog My Youtubes, Verizon!

I’ve got Verizon FiOS, fast, yet my loving wife can barely watch her cute kitty Youtube clips in dinky 240p – unless she tethers through her phone (tmo). Me and my obsession with North Korean documentaries, same deal, I can barely skate by on 240p, and it still buffers something fierce. I googled around and sure enough Verizon customers, and customers of other major ISPs like Time Warner and AT&T, had the same problem. Found proof here. That ain’t too cool, Verizon.

I came across possible solutions and the first one I tried is working real nice so far – setting my router to hand out Google’s public DNS servers which are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (others listed here), presto, now the wife’s watching her cute kittens and rabbits and pandas flopping around I’m watching my famine and horrors of cannibalism and labor/torture camp stuff in 1080p that finishes streaming the whole clip in less time than it would otherwise have taken just to buffer up the clips on 240p.

But hey sailor, wanna skip to the more aggressive and probably effective approach? Set your computers and devices to reject connections to 173.194.55.0/24 and 206.111.0.0/16, which you can do with iptables on Linux/Mac/Android or netsh on Windows. Instructions:  How to stop TWC ISPs sucking at Youtube and How to stop YouTube sucking (Windows guide).

By the way, did you know that North Korea only spent $110 million on Kim Jong-Il memorials last year? Yes, yes, I know that could have bought a bunch of corn all those poor people could have used to avoid starving to death, but you’d think the figure would be higher, right? Talking about the Dear Leader here. Anyway, thanks for the tips Internet; and suck it, Verizon, jive turkeys.

Doug Simmons