4G Dongle Youtube / Netflix playback

[robdood]

Ok, so I'm experiencing a strange issue with my 4G dongle on my Windows 10 desktop. 

Speedtest.net reports a download rate of 30Mbps.  

If I watch a youtube video, 'auto' quality setting will default to 480p.  If I manually up it to 720p, it constantly buffers.   Netflix is similar, although there are no quality settings to play with, the video quality is low resolution. 

If I watch a stream on Twitch, I can stream 1080p60 without any problem.  Strange, right? 

It gets weirder.  If I load up my VPN, then go to youtube, I can watch 1080p60 with no problem.  Netflix plays at full quality. 

Any ideas if I can get proper playback without having to use a VPN..?

[MI5 · Accepted solution]

@robdood O2 heavily compress data for streaming so that will probably be contributing to your issue. They also employ traffic shaping at certain times of the day so using your vpn is probably your safest method to get decent quality.

[Anonymous]

@robdood

On the face of it this sounds like either congestion or some form of traffic management.

I'd probably lean toward the latter.

HD video can use up a lot of bandwdith and the likes of the Youtube app will use as much as it can to improve audio and video quality, if you have a lot of users doing this in an environment that is subject to high contention such as a mobile network, things can slow down for everyone on that cell very quickly.

Is this something you have just recently experienced?

[robdood]

I've been using this dongle for a few weeks now. I was giving it time to see if it would improve but no luck. It's fine if that's how it's supposed to be, save me data and at least I have a workaround.

Thanks for the replies, people!