Fix Slow YouTube on iPad and iPhone 4

I’ve been having trouble watching YouTube videos on my iPhone 4 and my iPad. I have an Apple AirPort Extreme router and it’s the newest model with the most recent firmware. I was excited when the new firmware updates for the iPhone and iPad were released that were supposed to fix the YouTube problem. It didn’t fix my problem so I went looking elsewhere for a fix. Here’s some of the things people have tried that fixed it. What fixed it for me was turning off both the 802.11n and turning off my guest network on the router. Note: many people have commented about the 802.11n on the iPhone 4 but know this: the 802.11n on the AirPort Extreme runs at 5Mhz and the iPhone 4 runs at 2.4Mhz so they are not compatible. The iPad however does use the AirPort’s 5Mhz.

Try one or more of the following fixes:

– Turn off 802.11n on your AirPort Extreme router.
– Turn off the guest network on your AirPort Extreme router.

– Change the DNS settings in your iPhone settings for that router to OpenDNS settings of 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220 or Google’s DNS settings of 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4\n- Turn off auto brightness or, if your brightness is on the lowest setting, move it up some (weird idea if you ask me)
– Reset network settings in you Settings App > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings.

Let us know in the comments if you’re having problems and if any of the above worked for you or if you have another fix.

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Comments

  1. Thanks for posting. I am now using google DNS and turned off the guest network, appears to be working much better now.

    • Christopher says

      Changing the DNS to OpenDNS 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220 through airport utility worked for me, now getting same download speeds on the ipad as on my macbookpro.

    • How can I do that as well. Where do I go? Confused
      Thanks

    • Thanks for your video, i try the solution for DNS and an other for the memory, nothing change. One is sure at home we have iphone4 and it dont work and a samsung ace, and youtube is working fine without any problem. So what to think…..I let you what is the best iphone and problem or samsung without? I like iphone but i dont like to pay for something witch dont work!

  2. Tried all this fixes, and nothing seems to work

    Youtube it’s really annoying to watch on my iPad, i have to wait 10min to load 30seconds

    I’m using an alternative way, i download YourTube HD (from cydia) and now i’m downloading all the videos i wanna watch.

    But i would love to see a perfect solution.

    I reall think the real problem it’s my router, because on 3G everything work perfectly

  3. you mean Ghz,, not Mhz, move the decimal :)
    nice article, thanks for the tip

  4. three60guy says

    I’m using Google’s DNS (8.8.8.8) and my YouTube is pretty snappy.

  5. how i change the DNS over 3G connection

  6. Fix absolutely works, apart from the slow initial load, the video streams perfect now.and i often download youtube to iphone by use Aneesoft youtube converter,.lol……..and now im very enjoy it.

  7. Nope didn’t work for me …. :(

  8. Nope it didn’t work for me either so strange that it works for some and not others????

  9. Joakim Edsjö says

    OK, changing DNS to 208.67.222.222 worked wonders for me. Now Youtube loads smoothly (using an Airport extreme on G). The weird thing is that if I check the connection speed with an appropriate tool that measures to a fast external server, I have the same speed before and after changing the DNS (8.8 MB/s download), but Youtube loads much quicker with the new DNS. The google DNS did not help me though.

  10. Everything above didnt work for me. Youtube loading/buffering still very slow compared to 3GS.

    Anymore possible fixes?

  11. 8.8.8.8 does work on iphone 4! Thanks!

  12. I’ll give this a shot – it’s very annoying that YT is so slow to load videos on the iPhone 4

    The reason 3G is faster is because a way smaller file is streamed to the iPhone due to the slower connection. This means that the video quality is also greatly degraded in most situations.

  13. 8.8.8.8 works great on my iphone 4 !!!!

  14. Amazing! I turned off the Guest Network on my AE and things are flying now!!!!

  15. HAMDAN jabareen says

    I just changed my iPhone dns to google’s and now YouTube works wonderful, thank you

  16. Badderbrain says

    Me thick- how u switch off guest network?

    • To turn off guest-network; go to the “Airport Utility” application and under the “Base Station” menu at the top of the menu bar, select “Manual Setup”, then select the “Guest Network” tab in the application and un-check “Enable guest network.”

      Also make sure that you don’t have another idevice (ipod, iphone, ipad) running on the same router; that will slow it down. Place the other idevice in “airplane mode” when your not using the internet on it.

  17. so your going to stand there… owning apple and make your airport extreme not compatible with your iphone 4???????? I need the “N” to get the speed that I pay for 20 mbps to go from my motum through my router the airport extreme to my computers and iphones . The N speed was the sole reason for changing my router from the older technology 802.11 linksys to the airport extreme. with my old linksys router the 20mbps that I pay for and recently found out actually comes through at 30 mbps + was getting cut down to 12 or 13 mbps at best on speed tests with far slower performance if you ask me. It was acting more like good days on dial up. Now that I have the airport extreme I am getting consistent downloads of 30 mbps but now my iphone 4 is sucking wind. I just ran a speed test on my iphone 4 and got (hold the phone) .26 up and .27 down. I am so *%@*% mad right now.

  18. I had the same problem and tried every solution I could find on the Internet. Nothing helped. Last weekend I started from scratch with my wireless network and solved the problem.

    The solution? Keep the wireless network visible.

    I started from scratch. Tested the wireless speed, Changed one setting at a time and tested every change. Turned out the problems started when I changed the settings to not broadcast the wireless network name.

  19. Yes this works for me thanks for the useful information

  20. Holy Cow!! I have searched all over the place for the answer to my issue – I could not for the life of me stream music through my Iphone4 to my Airport Express – I could stream from my desktop to the airport but not my iphone.

    For the heck of it I changed the DNS settings in my express as above and voila! Like a charm – I now have music streaming from everywhere!

    THANK YOU!!!!!

  21. I just turned on 3G and YouTube goes much faster

  22. 8.8.8.8 did work for me

  23. Hey There. I found your blog using msn. This is an extremely well written article. I will be sure to bookmark it and come back to learn more of your helpful information. Thanks for the post. I will definitely return.

  24. I had same problem and went to settings and turned off cellular so iPad was limited to wifi only. Woiks like ze charm!

  25. jamesjamesjames says

    try videopind for ipad app..solves all ur problem! just enable youtube as ur featured channel.

  26. MATTHEW says

    How about not using such jargon, let us non-nerd freaks be able to fix the problem. annoying.

  27. My 4s streams YouTube way to slow compared to my old 3GS …. Sad panda.

  28. I was having problems spent a lot of time trying to find away way my youtube vids were loading so slow and then I changed my search engine to bing and suddenly my youtube vids loaded a lot faster.

    Hope this helped

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