My problem is when streaming videos on my phone it is really slow and buffers a lot. I checked the stream download rate only about 500 KBps but on my PC with a wired connection it is really fast like 10x the speed.
But when I turn on VPN on my phone videos load a lot faster it almost match the wired connection speed.
Is my wifi the problem? How can i fix this?
Edit: speedtest results on the phone is fine, and i downloaded some files on it and it is also fine, it only slows when loading videos.
I am guessing routing through the VPN is making it better. all paths lead to rome saying is true in the internet its how many stops between you and the streaming service
Your pc vs phone could be a few things, your pc will always get a solid connection to the internet and the phone using wifi is a best effort considering wifi is plagued with potential issues.
In general, VPN’s will make things slower since they add overhead. The only real exception is when they bypass a known congestion issue (maybe due to ISP peering arrangements) because an alternate route is taken with the VPN. The only other reason it could be faster because of ISP’s deprioritizing video traffic or prioritizing VPN traffic. Once traffic is in a VPN tunnel, the ISP can’t tell what type of traffic it is (aside from a VPN).
Does your ISP charge extra for you to stream video content at high resolution? Some ISPs do this because $$$.
Have you changed the DNS? Possibly the computer has a hard-coded DNS and the WiFi is using the one from your ISP try changing to OpenDNS, Cloudflare, or Google DNS and see if there is any difference.
Also wifi will switch bands from 5Ghz to 2.4Ghz when you’re past the 5Ghz band’s range. Which will cut the speed down. You can think of wifi range and speed like a car’s gas tank the faster you go the shorter you can travel due to the car running out of gas, but when you drive slower you have a longer travel distance because you now have a lot more gas to use up. A wired connection is like train tracks where its almost a straight shot with very little things slowing it down like the amount of traffic on the network, the type of train, the cargo.
I don’t think my ISP is at fault because when watching the same video on a wired connection it is absolutely fine, the problem only occurs on wifi.
I tried changing DNS multiple times and it didn’t do anything.