Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Slow DSL speed affect watching videos online?

Sep 30, 2009 6:54PM PDT

I have DSL Lite with AT&T, Lite is the slowest DSL speed currently offered by AT&T in my area, I was attempting to watch a video online at CBS.com last night of this week's episode of NCIS and the video would start, play, then stop, play, then stop, it was aggravating. I've experienced similar problems watching vids on YouTube. If I bumped up my current DSL speed with AT&T to Extreme 3.0 or their max which is Extreme 6.0 would the problem go away or would I still have the problem watching videos online? The computer I'm watching the vids on is a Dell Vostro 1510 laptop with Windows Vista Premium and it has integrated graphics, no dedicated video card. Would increasing the DSL speed help or if I had a better graphics card would that help?

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Yes, in theory, higher speed should do the trick.
Oct 1, 2009 2:38AM PDT

But that's in theory. My guess is that you have the 786kbps service and you would be lucky if you get half of that most time. I notice you need at least (around 700kbps) to view streaming video satisfactory. You can give the higher service a try; my experiences is that DSL is just not that reliable. But if there are no other choice..what can one do! You can try the buffer thing and see what happen, good luck.

- Collapse -
Re: Yes, in theory, higher speed should do the trick.
Oct 1, 2009 3:20AM PDT

Besides AT&T's DSL service there's Cable One but my cable TV service has been going down a lot lately. When you say try the "buffer thing" do you mean to pause the video and let it download? Thanks for the comments.