iPhone 3G + wifi + YouTube = Slow!

Hi,

definitively the iPhone (3G here), seems to have severe problems working with 54Mbps WIFI networks. Both forcing the WIFI to 802.11b or configuring the Transmission Fixed Rate to something below 54Mbps while continuing in 802.11g mode, really makes the experience better.

Right now I've my router (Linksys running DD-WRT), with WPA2 enabled + MAC Filter enabled + Transmission Fixed Rate set to 24Mbps (my internet connection is 12Mbps) and everything performs really well at home. 😎

Sadly, I cannot configure public hotspots I use continuously 😉 so I hope Apple will fix this, allowing the iPhone to work properly at 54Mbps speed, or negotiating at max 24Mbps or whatever. But currently the experience is far from perfect. Absolutely!

Ciao, stronk7 🙂

Yes I've had to do the same thing. 802.11g is a dead loss with 2.2. You can see in the YouTube progress bar that the streaming in is just not fast enough to keep up with the video.

Change to 802.11b though - supposedly a 5 times slower link - and the progress bar shows the streaming coming in very quickly indeed, easily keeping well ahead of the video playback.

There's definitely a major problem with 2.2's implementation of 11g......

I find it strange that such a crucial piece of software has been allowed to be left unrectified. Surely quite a lot of users would use youtube occasionally? As it is right now, it is virtually useless.

The problem isn't with YouTube it's with the WiFi.

It actually runs slowly with all apps, but for most things you don't notice as they're not time critical and bandwidth hungry.

As another poster here said, he also spotted it using google reader.

Sure it'll be fixed in 2.3 as long as Apple accept it's their firmware that's the problem.

Of course you have to ask how such a major issue got past testing in the first place. Not good is it 😟

well mine works just fine with youtube did you download anything that you'll think will make your iphone 3g to go slow

Is your WiFi running at 54Mb on an 802.11g base station though? Mine is now running fine with YouTube since I set the router to run SLOWER on 802.11b.....

is there any word from apple on this? my router can't be switched to just b. It's either g or b/g 😟

Ok, as my router can't be switched to b, i changed another settings - Fragmentation Threshold and CTS/RTS Threshold. I reduced them down to 511 and 512 accordingly , and YouTube is actually usable 🙂 still, as I have no control over public wifi networks, would be nice to hear what Apple says about it...

Also, surprised in so many updates there's still no fix... :/

Yeah it's definitely Wifi as a whole, not just youtube that is slow. Since I'm running other things as well as my iPhone on wifi I can't just switch the router to b. The only solution I found was to downgrade my software back to 2.1 from 2.2 and my wifi is fine now.

Update from me.

My TimeCapsule (ie Airport Extreme with a HDD) cannot be set to communicate at 802.11b only, so I cant test that.

I did notice something really weird looking in the diagnostics screen in the Airport Utility. Other wireless devices show what I consider to be a normal signal reading ( eg signal: -90dBm, noise: -40dBm). But the iPhone shows a signal of 0dBm and a positive noise level.

Occasionally, it will show, on inital connection, a 'normal' signal reading, and then change to the weird signal reading.

Other than that, still the same old thing. Dog slow youTube on the iPhone 3G, but fine on the other computers (both wired and wireless to TC).

By the way, this has been an issue for me since I got the phone in (I think) October. I cant recall if it had f/w 2.0 or 2.1 on it initially. It has 2.2 now, no change.

Same issues for me - glad I found this thread. Come on Apple, sort this out!

Here in Manchester, England- just noticed this problem on my new (less-than-one-week-old!) iPhone.
Very disappointing 😟
Hope this gets sorted in next firmware update.

I'm almost beginning to miss my old Nokia!

Well at least in my case, it cannot be the wifi -- buying songs via iTunes directly on the iPhone downloads the songs blazingly fast. At the same time, YouTube remains unusable. Is there someone network savvy enough to have a look at the network traffic in order to find out what the iPhone tries to load from YouTube? Reading this whole topic I think the following could be happening:

1. The iPhone YouTube app needs H.264 video to be able to play it; flash does not work, as we all know. Because of this the iPhone speed is not directly comparable with streaming YouTube with your Mac.
2. On 3G, the loading time seems to be just fine, the quality is lower, however, meaning that the iPhone loads a video with less resolution and, thus, less file size.
3. On (fast) wifi---and this is now IMHO---the iPhone seems to attempt to load the best video quality possible, which would accordingly result in slower downloads. This would also explain why the downloads appear to be faster on slower wifi-networks -- the iPhone chooses to download a smaller version of the video, sensing the slower connection.

The thing that would be of interest is: how large is the resultion/video size of the video being downloaded so slowly? Maybe it is larger in resolution that it needs to be for the iPhone screen?! In that case Apple could attempt to limit the download size/resolution of the video or at least make that an option.

Just my 2cents.

Same for me.YouTube is totally unusable with wifi.
Videos on Howcast and Babelgum are superfast, so I doubt it's a wi-fi issue, I''m more inclined to think that this is a youtube server problem, or better with the stream- format used for the iPhone connected via wi-fi.

Just for the record: a video from (ehrm..) youporn loaded in a snap using wifi.