Pings/Tracerts to youtube.com aren't really useful. Most videos aren't served directly from youtube's own servers but from peered caching servers around the country (usually collocated inside an ISP's facilities).
Having the same issues described, along with a few friends who have insight connections as well (in the evansville area btw). The problem seems to be between insight/twc and a set of caching servers in Kansas under the 206.111.10.xxx ip block (hosted by xo.net). Pings are consistent and packet loss in negligible to there, but none of us can seem to get more than ~150KB/s of throughput, which is insufficient for HD streams.
To verify yourself (in Win7) you can do the following: Open the Resource Monitor (perfmon.exe /res from Run; or start-search it) Under the Network Tab filter the processes by your browser Open TCP Connections and R-Click the column header (image, pid, etc) and hit Select Columns Enable the Receive (B/sec) option and sort the connections list by it
With a video streaming (and not much else going on otherwise) the top item should be the server you're actually getting the video from. HD videos usually come in at around 300+KB/s, for reference.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure where to proceed with this information since it's well above your average tier 1 phone jockey's abilities. Maybe someone from insight/twc will see this and look into it...
·
·