I still remember the horror of moving from Be to ADSL Max, lost a lot of speed due to no longer being able to push 3dB SNR.
Of course that was nothing like moving from Digital Region, back to ADSL2 because Openreach couldn't seem to get the tag off my line to order FTTC without doing that.
It kinda boggles to mind to think of my Internet journey, something along the lines of:
14.4K, 33.6K, 56K, 500K, 1Mb, 2Mb, 5.5Mb, 3Mb, 40Mb, 99Mb, 3Mb, 80Mb, 915Mb (landline speeds only, ignoring balancing and mobile)
Hard to say for sure... but from own personal experiences I'd tend to agree that there are less of the smaller type problems but there are and have been some quite large ones that hit headline news.
He brought up the final mile.... which in the UK has seen huge investment, so I don't agree with that bit. 21CN was multi-million investment. WDM technology has given us vast increases in the backhaul capacity and put an end to the days when bandwidth cost £1 per GB and regular peak time congestion being a regular experience.
Which is understandable, as small problems were less likely to notice seeing as the vast majority of sites are hosted by half a dozen CDNs/cloud providers so a glitch there has huge impact whereas a single data centre going down would go unnoticed by most people. Even with that said, I feel like such problems get fixed a lot faster except the outlier situations where a data centre actually burned down.
Don't get me wrong, I have regular problems with YouTube, but that mostly seems to come down to their prioritising
active channels/videos. When you try to view a video that has very few views and especially if its old, it seems to take forever as I assume its having to pull it from archived storage to your local CDN cache at a very low priority.
As for last mile, even if you consider they're probably focusing on the US, bringing contention into a discussion about sites being down is plain wrong, its a different issue entirely. My friend in Texas loses his DSL several times a year, but I don't think that's worse than its ever been. Also his speeds seem pretty consistently okay, as I send files to him regularly and I can push his line speed - which is pretty impressive for how far away he is. Interestingly since I moved to FTTP its far more consistent, the speed used to fluctuate a lot and just establishing the connection would be flaky, completely fixed since the move (not sure if FTTP related or switching backhauls).
The video to me seems like they needed filler content, clutching at straws with everything they said.
That's what bothered me, he seemed to include several comments that weren't relevant to "sites going down", mixing the messaging. Sadly, they always seem to do that on Tech Quickie.
I know the idea is to try to explain things so a less technical audience than their main channel, but I think they just confuse people more by spreading misinformation.