Ditto. I don't know how many times I've said "man, freaking Google owns Youtube, how can it take so long to load."

I've never been able to watch anything in 1080 or 720 unless I want to go run an errand while it's loading.

After running these commands...1080 streaming like a boss.

That blocking the CDN improved your loading speed doesn't provide evidence of throttling. It's equally plausible that the CDN is slow for everyone, whether you're a Time Warner subscriber or not. The way to verify this would be to connect to that CDN from different ISPs with similar routes and see if there appears to be a hard cap in one connection but not the other.

I'm on TWC and this fix with iptables just made a massive difference. Whether it's throttling or not, I'm very impressed with the results.

I have Verizon, as does a buddy of mine, and he and I have both been trading horror stories about how much YouTube sucks for the past few months.

I also applied the trick and now, magically, everything is quite a bit faster.

That said, while I'm not a network guy, this suggests that there's an issue with the YouTube CDN, not anything in particular with Time Warner or Verizon, unless they're doing something horrible relating to net neutrality.

My guess is just that there are a couple of CDN blocks that are preferred by the load balancers and they're saturated as a result, and blocking these IP ranges sends you to a less balanced block of CDNs.

You can easily check if you have a 4g (LTE, HSPA+, WiMax, etc.) and checking the same youtube video in HD. It's truly night and day and really got me so mad at Roadrunner once I discovered that.

Except you aren't necessarily hitting the same CDN when you connect via 4g