Bypassing YouTube stream throttling by ISPs [for Windows]

If you have a very decent internet connection (equal to or more than 4 mbps) but still not able to stream YouTube video’s without it waiting for buffering a lot, it maybe because your local ISP could be using a CDN for caching YouTube instead of loading from the main site.

There is an easy way to bypass this throttling by asking your OS to block traffic from the caching CDN and loading the content directly from YouTube by simply providing the following command at elevated command prompt

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netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="YouTube Cache Bypass" dir=in action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes

and if you later need to disable the rule use

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netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name="YouTube Cache Bypass"

I am able to feel the difference in YouTube streaming after adding the above rule to the firewall and a happy YouTube customer again.

How to stop YouTube sucking (Windows guide)