Slow Seek times with YouTube

[Kamek]

Same here across my phone (on wifi), laptop and TV. It's something to do with youtube and BT specifically, as all other apps are fine, and if I hotspot off my mobile network, youtube is then fine.

Some testing has revealed:

-BT broadband default DNS on LG TV: ~1.6 Mbps default DNS
-Cloudflare DNS on TV: ~3.4 Mbps
-Google DNS on TV: ~5 Mbps
-Same LG TV via 5G hotspot: ~19 Mbps
-Other streaming apps are fine
-Issue began in early June 2026

"The Walk With Me Tim channel was horrific with resolution drops and buffering yet GeoWizard played out fine with a healthy buffer."

This may be to do with the codec that the video is using. When checking "stats for nerds" on youtube, very rarely a video would be using a VP9 codec instead of AV1. VP9 shows a much, much higher (literally 10x higher) connection speed than AV1.

As youtube’s VP9 and AV1 streams can be served from different Google cache paths, BT’s route can be broken for the AV1 path, while VP9 still works normally.

[orozz]

Some reports of the same issue on EE community too

[gizmo777]

Yes this problem hasn’t gone away at all and BT support has been no help and won’t acknowledge it’s an issue their end.

For me it’s happening with any device I use YouTube with, whilst connected to my BT internet fibre optic 1000mbps connection. No VPN is used. Nothing has been changed and it only happens with Youtube. started happening around early June.

Huge amounts of seek time buffering when you start a video or scrobble it to a specific point. It should be instant like it used to. Now it struggles to play even 1080p videos and often will auto default to 480p on the quality because of the long seek time as YouTube thinks my connection is poor with BT.

its disappointing as I’m on YouTube premium.

[bobpullen]

The last time I recall something like this happening, it ended up being specific to certain CDN locations. There was some decent troubleshooting in the thread here before it was eventually resolved.

Perhaps worth a read to see if there are any pointers that might help isolate the cause this time round?

[Kimberlin]

I just find it incredibly odd that this seems to be affecting BT/EE. I'm just not seeing this problem on Plusnet, at all.  Whether that is genuinely to do with the fact I don't use an ISP router or ISP DNS settings, I have no idea, but using Brave browser even with strict ad blocking, YouTube is loading perfectly well with no delays on my PC. This includes on both my iPhone and iPad. There just isn't a problem.

[tyencyu]

It’s definitely affecting plusnet, I’m affected and there’s another PN user on the Reddit thread also affected.

I don’t use their DNS settings, I do use their router though. I’ve tested on edge, Firefox, brave and occasionally it seems video dependent. I’ve tested on mobile on and off VPN, the issues return when I drop off the VPN, stats for nerds shows a huge decrease in speed.

I’ve disabled IPV6, rebooted, plenty of self troubleshooting. 

[Kimberlin]

@tyencyu  Interesting that you get Ipv6 on Plusnet, I don't. I assume that you were picked for some sort of trial? I wasn't aware otherwise that it was available for general use?

I do have a Plusnet router lurking around somewhere, but I'm not setting it up just to see if the problems some of you state you're facing exist.

[tyencyu]

@Kimberlin 

Whether it actually does anything or not I’m not sure, IPv6 is always permanently disabled on my windows machine, but checking last night my router had it enabled so I’ve disabled that via the Hub 2 interface, didn’t solve anything unfortunately 

I wouldn’t bother setting it up if I were you

[Kimberlin]

@tyencyu  Ipv6 isn't enabled on Plusnet for the general customer (as far as I know).

I have no intentions of setting up my ISP router. I stopped using ISP routers a long time ago. The only reason I have it is because ISP's don't give you the option of not having one, otherwise I'd have refused it. Anyway, we digress.

[Steve_M]

Hi All,

I've reported this internally to the relevant teams - nothing obvious so far but will keep looking.

Steve