Revealed: Why YouTube videos take forever to buffer

The amount of time taken for a video to buffer on YouTube or other video services is an outcome of how much networks should pay to connect to others as a result of peering connections.

According to Stuff.co.nz, technology website Ars Technica argues that business decisions involving ‘peering’ agreements that internet companies make to pass traffic from one to another guide the way videos and services are provided.

The report said that the negotiations are over caching services that store videos closer to people's homes so they can load faster in one’s browser and when internet providers refuse to upgrade peering connections by the likes of Google and Netflix, traffic gets congested.

There exist a dozen or so networks consisting of data centres throughout the world which are operated by private businesses and they can reach every part of the internet by simply peering with one another.

However, these networks called Tier 1 don’t need to buy ‘transit’- an arrangement where one company pays another to accept its traffic and distribute it to all networks connected to the internet.

The report added that the direction in which traffic flows has no impact on how much it costs to carry it and as video streaming traffic dominates the web, so-called ‘eyeball’ networks (ISPs who deliver traffic over the last mile) can never be in balance with the networks that deliver video under the old measurement.