Three Ireland prioritising YouTube traffic

[Sean]

In Ireland, the Three mobile network appears to have recently started prioritising YouTube traffic.  Interestingly it no longer prioritises port 443 (SSL) or 8080 (Ookla's speedtest) like previously, so there's now a substantial difference between the speed I get on YouTube and even Ookla's Speedtest with Three.  As Google Photos seems to share some resources with YouTube for video uploads, it also delivers unusually quick transfers from Google Photos during peak time.

 

The following shows an example where I ran a speed test on Ookla (using a Dublin server) and started downloading a video from Google Photos:

 

 

The following is the Ookla Speedtest result from the above screenshot and TestMy:

 

 

Multi-threaded connections have always performed better on the Three network, so Ookla's figure tends to be several times higher during peak time than what can be achieved with simple web downloads and FTP transfers as how TestMy measures. 

 

The following shows another example, this time a file download from Leaseweb's test file site:

 

 

133KB/s x 8 = 1064Kbps, similar to the above TestMy download result.  Now let's download a video clip I have in Google photos:

 

 

4MB/s x 8 = 32Mbps!  It shows just how much bandwidth a provider can squeeze in during congestion.  

 

I have observed a similar variation on iD Mobile, a virtual mobile operator that operates on the Three network.