In February 2018 I made the switch to YouTube TV, dropping the very expensive Verizon FiOS TV. When I first picked up YouTube TV the subscription was $35/monthly and with my Verizon FiOS 1Gbps Internet at $130/monthly I was saving around $65/monthly over what I had been paying Verizon for both Internet and TV. That was a huge savings when you think about that year over year… $780/yearly. And it enabled my family to watch TV on whatever device they wanted to use.. TV (Roku), Tablet, Smartphone, etc.

Last month YouTube announced that the price for new and existing members would be increasing to $64.99/monthly, although they would be adding 8 additional channels. As many have pointed out that’s a significant increase, almost $180 more yearly. The “cheaper” alternative in YouTube TV is actually now one of the more expensive options available to consumers.

There are hundreds of posts on the Internet that detail the alternatives to YouTube TV, – Sling TV, Hulu Live, Philo, etc. I’m not going to go through all the different options… why are you here anyway?

The six accounts are very handy for my large family… the limitation of three streams though can make for some interesting hallway discussion when the kids are constantly kicking each other out. It would have been nice if YouTube TV had increased the number of streams when increasing the price. Perhaps if YouTube were to bundle YouTube Premium, now that’s a feature that I would really enjoy. I would probably estimate that I watch more YouTube than “TV” these days… and in a COVID-19 world, with no sports to watch, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

I’ll keep YouTube TV for now… but I’ll probably need to evaluate my options in the near future.

Cheers!

I highly doubt there’s a Google caching server 2 hops away from my desktop… so I ran a few trace routes to endpoints that I know are in Ireland and Singapore and they to responded in under 1-5ms. That response wasn’t physically possible given the distance that ICMP packet would need to traverse. I ran a quick test by setting up a Linux CentOS Linux VM on Digital Ocean in their Singapore Data Center and ran a quick traceroute while performing a packet trace on the CentOS Linux VM – no ICMP traffic was observed from my Windows 10 desktop. So there was something else responding on behalf of the destination IP.

I ran a quick scan with Norton Internet Security – not entirely sure how well that product protects Windows machines today as Norton seems to be more of an advertising platform for LifeLock but that’s a discussion for another day and time. In the end Norton didn’t reveal any surprises and I couldn’t find anything on my end after replicating the same behavior on multiple other machines, both Windows and Linux (CentOS/Ubuntu) on my home network. I did noticed that UDP and TCP traffic seem unaffected, just ICMP traffic. So I did what any good engineer would do, I took to Google Search and found that I wasn’t alone in my discovery;

Verizon Community Forums – TRACE1 ROUTE Odd Results FiOS Network

There was also a post and reply over on the r/networking reddit sub from reddigel suggesting that the issue was a DNAT rule that was forwarding ICMP traffic with a TTL > 1 to the ONT .

The DNAT theory seems the most plausible explanation because something is replying to the ICMP packets with a TTL > 2 and it’s fairly close to the source.

Anyone have any other theories?

Cheers!

I had noticed some occasional buffering using my old 30/20 Verizon FiOS Internet connection – having three teenage daughters in the household doesn’t really help. Thankfully since the upgrade we’ve been issue free and buffering free. Now I might need to spend some time optimizing the two Aruba IAP 205s that I have providing wireless connectivity throughout the household as more and more devices are connecting via wireless.

Cheers!

YouTube TV has Nat Geo and Nat Geo Wild which are a requirement from the family.

The next big question… should I go with Verizon Gigabit Internet?

Anyone with any recommendations?