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With all the hype over data privacy laws here in Europe (GDPR, which stands for General Data Protection Regulation), I can see where non-technical people get confused over using data to refer to integrated circuit data instead of personal data. The best replacement word I can think of would be "bytes", e.g. "Uploading 12 MB of random bytes..." To a non-technical person, they will more likely see the word "bytes" as technical jargon than personal data. Even if they Google (or Bing) the keyword "Bytes", the search results will not be about organisations collecting data, privacy, regulations, etc.

@CA3LE is it just randomly generated bit patterns of ones and zeroes? The word “information” makes it sound like the information has some intelligent content. Maybe use “numbers” or “bit patterns” ?

Going by that stats for nerds screen, YouTube is receiving plenty of throughput going by its measurement. If it's correct, 26Mbps is enough for even 4K streaming, not that I suggest trying that over 4G. The long delay is likely a problem with the CDN it is trying to connect to. YouTube first tries connecting to a nearby CDN such as within the Three network. If that fails, YouTube will then stream from another CDN. The first thing I suggest is try setting the DNS on that computer to Google's: Right-click the Wi-Fi icon in your taskbar and then "Open Network & Internet Settings" Click "Change adapter options" In the list of networks, Right-click the WiFi icon and then "Properties" Click "Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)" then click "Properties" Choose the option "Use the following DNS server addresses:". Enter 8.8.8.8 for the preferred and 8.8.4.4 for the alternative. Click OK to both screens. Try playing a few YouTube videos to see if they start any quicker. If not, you can undo these steps by following them, but choose "Obtain DNS server address automatically" for step 5. Another thing you can try is run the utility DNSQuerySniffer, which you can download here. Choose your Wi-Fi Interface in the list and let it run as Administrator (required to sniff traffic). Start playing a YouTube video and check the DNSQuerySniffer screen for any hosts ending in "googlevideo.com". The following shows an example from my end: If any of the googlevideo hosts have a red dot, this indicates a failed look-up. You can try also pinging the IP addresses under the 'A' column to see if they reply, particularly for the last googlevideo.com one it shows when YouTube is still at the black screen.

I just tried opening a YouTube video on my iPad Air 2 and it only took about 1 second to load and start playing. I was outside on my deck at the fringe of my wireless range. I got RTs of 70 to 200 mS and download speeds of 7.5 to 21.5 Mbps out there. I typically get 200 Mbps inside the house and RTs of typically between 50 & 100 mS. I’m in the US using Spectrum @CA3LE - the time-of-day showing for the RT is one hour later than the time for the download test results.