Korean Job Discussion Forums

[AbbeFaria]

When I lived in Pohang last year, I often had to spend time buffering videos on youtube. It was very frustrating but I chalked it up to the somewhat slow internet speed I had down there. Now I'm up in Gangnam and just had internet installed and I find it's doing the exact same thing. Even worse, if that's possible. I did a speed check, I'm pulling about 40mb/s off my wireless router but it makes no difference. Youtube videos hang or buffer constantly. It's not my computer because I was in the States until last week and never had this problem. Anyone know the deal with this?


-S-

[Porksta]

It's Youtube, not the internet. Not anything you can do about it.

[Mr. BlackCat]

I had a similar problem. Around this time last year, youtube suddenly stopped working for me. And I mean suddenly--I was in the middle of a video and it just stopped loading, refreshed the page and it just wouldn't start up again. Some videos would somewhat work sometimes, but I would have to wait a very long time for them to buffer (about half an hour for a one minute clip). It was only youtube, I could stream video smoothly elsewhere and I did nothing to my computer that would cause this to happen. My computer at work was fine, though.

I talked with some people here in Korea and they told me that they, too, sometimes had 'down' times with youtube, it would just suddenly get very slow for a day or two, though nothing as long as mine (a few friends of mine, like you, always had slow streaming). After reading online I found others around the world complaining about the same thing. Often, these people would share enough information to realize that they were all using the same company and were in the same general area. Some came up with theories that in order for youtube to meet growing demand on its servers and bandwidth, they intentionally slow their streaming to certain areas on a rotating basis. Now, this all sounds like a conspiracy theory and it's hard to get straight up info through the web about this stuff, but it started to make sense as I entered my third week without youtube.

Then just before Christmas youtube started working fine again, like nothing had happened. I did nothing to my computer to change anything. Just as suddenly as the problem appeared, it went away. Now, every couple of months youtube will slow down again, but not nearly as badly as last year. Usually it'll buffer much quicker than it plays, but over the last couple of weeks it's been about even. The last few days have been worse, I often have to reload the page because the stream will just stop or take way too long to load.

So, yeah, that's my youtube saga. I never realized how much I used youtube until it wasn't available, and now that it's slowing down again I'm kicking myself for not weaning myself off. I'd try talking to people in your area, especially those using the same company. How about your work computer? Good luck to you.

[nicwr2002]

I stopped watching youtube in Korea because of this reason. I live in Gwangju Jeolla-namdo by the way. Maybe there's a conspiracy against youtube in Korea where they slow down the access to the site?

[AbbeFaria]

Yeah, I spend a lot of time on youtube also. Plus I make my own videos that I upload periodically. Uploads I usually had to let run while I was sleeping when I lived in Pohang. I haven't uploaded yet in Gangnam so we'll see how that goes.

[staygold]

Koreans would rather use those clunky Naver, Daum, and Mgoon video sites. Youtube hasn't really received a warm welcome here, so Korea is probably way down there on some sort of priority list.

[Who's Your Daddy?]

Get Internet Download Manager. Then you can download anything from youtube pretty fast. Then watch the download.

[fermentation]

I find it a lot slower at certain times of the day. Sometimes 1080p HD vids stream instantly, sometimes I have to wait forever to watch a 5 minute video in 480.

[swigs]

Someone told me that the 2011 Japan earthquake broke some internet cables, causing parts of the internet to be slow.

But there is probably parts of truth to your conspiracy theory, as Google is a for profit company, and most likely reallocates resources to the most profitable, ie. most ad buying, countries.

Hopefully they can build a stronger YouTube presence here....

[orosee]

The problem of slow YouTube predates the Japan earthquake. People have been using proxy servers and actually had a very smooth streaming experience. So there may be something true about the conspiracy rumours even though I can't imagine a good reason.

As a previous poster said, if you know wht you want to watch, you can use a download manager (I use jDownloader) and get a copy of your preferred quality on your computer, then watch it from there. I'm into "Let's Play" videos and the speed with which you can download 10-20 GB of 1080p or 720p game footage is amazing, in fact with a download manager YouTube is one of the fastest download sources I have here. Go figure.

[northway]

I thought it was common knowledge that ISPs choked it in Korea. Now, I've never actually had any confirmation that this is fact, but I've heard it pretty frequently. Is this not the case?