YouTube terrible speed and buffering

[Alecmac007]

I am on Vodafone fibre so just under a year and no problems getting 10mbps but over the last 5 days I am getting terrible performance on YouTube on wifi on all devices. It either buffers, doesn’t play video and occasionally I get a period of a few minutes with no problems.

I have rebooted router and reset firmware and spoke to  Vodafone but no solution. If I connect to mobile data all is good, and all other streaming video sites work fantastic and my wifi speed is always good. Any ideas?

[4pack]

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@Dtkwong wrote:

It is an issue that Vodafone needs to own and take seriously. Somehow I don’t see Vodafone is taking ownership of the issue and not taking the issue seriously. 

Customers reporting the issue would be taking for a script ride, spending hours working with the trouble shooting, on a trial and error basis and ended up getting no where having the problem fixed. 
The issue has been going on for a month, as far as I know, and has remained not fixed. 

Surely a proper customer satisfaction review would have highlighted this issue and that it has not been fixed for over a month. It shows the level of customer service is appalling to say the least. 
My Vodafone plan will run out soon, I will look for another supplier instead of wasting my time here !

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Indeed, so this would suggest that things are actually working, (all be it badly) as intended...

[mmotti]

@daernwill take a look at the links shortly.

The level 2 guys I'm speaking to now all sound UK based and are being really proactive. I've not heard anything today but the guy my case was assigned to did say they would come back when there was more word from level 3. The complaints team also set a call for later in the week to catch up.

I don't have a reference number as such but I've been dealing with:

* Connor (Level 2)

* Kai (Level 2) - Took it upon himself to personally assign the case to himself

* Kate (Complaints)

All of the above have been fantastic so far, despite the issue not yet being resolved.

I grew impatient yesterday and made a new vlan to tunnel through Wireguard and assigned it to a new SSID and a couple of ports on my router so I now have zero issues with YouTube/Google Play. It's bliss. Not happy to have to be paying the VPN cost but they have promised to reimburse me. Runs at router level and because it's wireguard I still get my full 70mbps!

[yorkshireskippy]

I eventually got a UK based tech guy, started all promising.....ended up back to square one.

[mmotti]

I don't know if maybe my experience is perhaps a little different because I had previously got to level 3 and sent them packet captures, tracerts etc so they're currently acting as a channel between myself and l3 ATM. I was asked to provide more specific tracerts etc.

I have said to both teams that any further troubleshooting steps they need I'm happy to do.

[daern]

@mmotti Thanks. Will be intrigued to see what you see at your end and if it in any way mirrors my own captures.

FWIW, after two hours (seriously, no exaggeration!) on the phone I've finally got L2 to find the email I sent them on Saturday which has more detail of the problem in it. The person on the phone responded with "Oh, that's quite technical. I'm going to escalate this to L3" and I'm now waiting for some sort of response from them. Hopefully with two of us now hammering away here, we'll get somewhere. I'm not betting against them closing the case in 3 days time though... 

[mmotti]

@daernYes they seem to have an issue with locating emails. I've had several calls where they've stated to have no knowledge or something or that they hadn't seen an email come through, yet when they checked it whilst on the phone after I gave them the time/dates of emails sent suddenly there they are! That's even formatting the email subject exactly as requested.

So these are my experiences:

Delayed load - https://i.imgur.com/hzukiBb.png

Load instantly - https://i.imgur.com/lyDFjGD.png

Both examples have "cgne" and what looks like the same path to generate the links, yet one loads right away and the other took some time.

Unless I'm mistaken they seem to also use same host for providing the video too in the above examples, just with different parameters in the URL which makes it even more odd.

Also what do you think about the UDM Pro? I'm toying with the idea of something like that or an RB5009 to replace my Edgerouter ER-X.

[Jayach]

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@4pack wrote:

@Jayach  Are you on the payroll?

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What a ridiculous question. Just look at some of my replies on other threads. I would have been sacked by now if I was.

To anyone else, it's obvious this problem is within Vodafone's network. Replacement router and anything you do at your end won't cure it. A VPN will "work around" the problem by bypassing the failing part of Vodafone's network.

The fact Vodafone's network engineers can't cure (or possibly even identify) the problem shows just how bad the support is.

They really should be more honest with us customers.

[yorkshireskippy]

I've not mentioned the fact that Google Play Services also fails to work and nothing gets updated until you connect to a different WiFi, such as BT, next door.

[4pack]

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@Jayach wrote:

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@4pack wrote:

@Jayach  Are you on the payroll?

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What a ridiculous question. Just look at some of my replies on other threads. I would have been sacked by now if I was.

To anyone else, it's obvious this problem is within Vodafone's network. Replacement router and anything you do at your end won't cure it. A VPN will "work around" the problem by bypassing the failing part of Vodafone's network.

The fact Vodafone's network engineers can't cure (or possibly even identify) the problem shows just how bad the support is.

They really should be more honest with us customers.

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No offence, just wondering why you have spent 2 years of your life posting 3000+ posts in what could only be described as the technical support equivalent of hell? Just to help out a multi billion tech company whos own paid support staff are too incompetent to do so?

I mean that's great I'm a shareholder so free support staff works in my favor, unlike the vodafone network!

And as you said yourself, you don't have the problem?

So you don't know the fix?

Which leads me to consider why are you in this thread?

Because yes the problem is inside Vodas network, it looks to be purely because of traffic management, either working or not working correctly. I have seen this and tried to explain this to everyone here that's currently battling a frankly dishonest technical support team. And I have also detailed a fairly simple test anyone could do on their own network to confirm these findings for themselves.

Anyway my advise to anyone facing the problem and once you have done the dance of a thousand technical support dances ask for it to be made into an official complaint and or escalated to the executives office.

You will then travel through technical support to the candy cane forest of customer relations.

You must receive a complaint number, as per their own code of practice they must investigate and contact you back within a set time frame and if the complaint then cannot be resolved you have further recourse including raising a complain with CISAS. But you may get to enter the executive garden where maybe someone might listen or if your lucky show you the exit.

Quote from their own documentation:
Vodafone have an acceptable use policy which is referred to in its T&Cs, however, it does not make a policy of limiting customer’s service, and none of our Fixed Line Broadband products have any usage caps.

That right there is bull......

[Beth]

Hi all! As we've mentioned previously on this thread, we were collating examples to be able to raise this to the right team so this could investigated and resolved for you all. This was raised to the back office team via the Social Media department on Sept 22nd 2022, we're waiting for an update. Once we have one, we can update you here.

In the meantime, some customers have found a VPN or static IP (which you can request from the Social Media team) has bypassed the issue and some customers have found this to only be a temporary fix, unfortunately such is the nature of things whilst we're still trying to pinpoint the cause of the problem.

I'd like to assure you all that we are working on the issue and this is being investigated. If you haven't spoken to the Social Media team here already, please reach out to them with a link to this thread and your username so they are able to collect the information needed to add your example to our request. The more examples we're able to add will make it easier for the team to diagnose and resolve the problem, as well as being able to see the scale of the problem itself and how it's affecting you all