Ever find at home that the internet becomes very slow suddenly and for no apparent reason? You guess someone is downloading a movie but no one is. Someone is uploading to Youtube, but that should be okay as it doesn’t take up any of the download bandwidth. Wrong.
My son is very conscious about what happens when he starts to upload his Youtube movies – the rest of us have no internet! Quite simply the Youtube video takes up all the upload bandwidth and so the forlorn clicks the rest of the family make don’t reach their destinations to request new content. Result – no internet browsing. When my son estimated it would take about 4 hours to upload his next video, the hunt was on for a solution that would satisfy us both.
There is some software you can buy, and you can get involved with the intricacies of your router. But you can also simply use a Chrome browser tool to limit the upload for free 🙂
Just go to the Chrome browser control dropdown menu by clicking on the three buttons in the top right corner of the Chrome browser:
Customise Chrome using this dropdown menu.
Then hover over More tools. A new menu will pop out and at the bottom you will see Developer tools:
Tools menu
Click on Developer tools then click on Network and finally click on No throttling
Finally, you will get to the settings that are very important for developers. They can use these to test how their products will act under differing internet speeds and latencies associated with access types – mostly for mobile phones. We can use them to limit the upload speed.
Having done some speed tests on my system, I guess that the upload speed could be about 2 Mb/s on a good day. So I decided to limit my son to 1 Mb/s to allow the rest of us to communicate with the outside world. I had to also set a download speed limit so I chose 3 Mb/s knowing that speed would probably be more than he would need for anything he does.
To do that:
- Under Custom, click on: Add …
- Give it a profile name – I chose: Youtube
- The units specified are in kb/s. I wrote in 3000 kb/s for Download, 1000 kb/s for Upload and 2 ms for latency (increasing this potentially slows down the internet – not what I want to do). Note: if you have written only 3,1 and 2 then you will effectively have shut off the internet for that computer!
- Then click : Add
- When you shut the Setting window you will still see the No throttling label.
- Click on the No throttling label then select Youtube.
- You have now limited the computer to whatever values you chose.
- Harmony returns to the household 🙂
Make sure you remember to return the setting to No throttling afterwords.
Credit for the solution goes to this webpage:
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/499k39/is_there_a_way_to_limit_youtube_upload_bandwidth/
