[NCLUG] DSL Throttling or General Congestion?

[F.L. Whiteley]

I was asked by a friend of a customer to look at his PC yesterday about
some issues.
 
The customer has 256K DSL on local regional ISP megacentral, the friend
has MSN/Qwest DSL 1.5Mbps.  Since he was a fellow pilot, I thought I'd
show him a couple of YouTube videos.  The performance was terrible.  The
video stopped to buffer about every 15 seconds and couldn't be smoothly
viewed until cached.  It was worse than the buffering on a 256K
connection.  I have a couple of 1.5Mbps DSL on the same regional ISP and
have never had a YouTube video skip a beat.  I have another in the local
senior center on a wireless router with the same regional ISP and even
with 10-12 laptops connected, I've never seen this type of performance.
The ActionTec Internet/Ethernet lights were blinking pretty slowly.
 
Other web sites seemed to open quickly and general performance seemed to
be what I'd expect for 1.5Mbps, but with caching, who knows.  I didn't
really have time to try some other tests from other sites.
 
Any comments from Qwest or Qwest/MSN users?  I don't know if different
backbones are used by the former and latter, but certainly the regional
ISP doesn't ever see this.   I'm just wondering how over-subscribed
their network may be or whether they're throttling media sites.
 
Sorry for the off topic nature, but this is a good local cross section
of user experience.
 
TIA,
 
Frank
Greeley