WTF French Dorm Internet

I ran an experiment last night. I tried to load a 2 minute and 38 second YouTube video. I bet you didn't even know 2 minute 38 second videos needed to load, did you? They do on a French dorm internet connection!
 
I started downloading the video around 11:16. It took me a minute to get the camera, so we've already got a bit of the light grey progress bar loaded--a good sign!

Four minutes later, however, we've only progressed approximately one millimeter, to just near the yellow bar...

 

Another 12 minutes on, we're still in the same place. And this is when I quit.

 

At 11:45 it is suddenly all loaded (I forgot to close the tab). I get excited. I press play and get exactly 10 seconds of music. And then, I hit the mystery spot. This is the spot in the video where playback stops. You can move the timer forward and it jumps back to this spot. You can move it backwards and it plays until this spot then stops. Gah. I don't understand the spot--it's not always there, but it is pretty frequent. No watching the video past the spot. All that build-up and time spent waiting for the download wasted. I'll just catch up on music and pop culture when I move to a different country...

I realize this is a silly example--YouTube is not critical for anything. It is in fact the opposite of critical. But imagine trying to load your email on this. Skype? You can only hear every fifth word, and only if the video is off.  Downloading papers to effectively do research as a Master's student? Haha no, silly girl! I really shouldn't complain though. Two of my classmates live in a dorm without internet. Yeah, they make those here! I cannot imagine what chain of thought led to the conclusion that students do not need the internet (and I do mean need, not just for YouTube). But it happened. They are saved by access to a wifi network run by one of the cellphone companies, but that really shouldn't be necessary.

I am in a different dorm complex this semester and it hasn't helped the internet at all. We sometimes also have an issue where the internet will go out at all the dorms, but not anywhere else (since we all scatter to nearby cafés with working wifi when that happens). I think it means the organization that runs the housing just forgets to pay the bill sometimes and they cut us all off :) The most recent day this happened was Nov. 1, All Saints Day, which is a holiday. It was a perfect, rainy, work at home kind of day, only the first thing I needed to do was send an email to my supervisor (who is in Thailand right now).  Nothing like starting a holiday running around town in a monsoon looking for an open café with wireless!

 Ahh, WTF.