Figured out a way to get around my ISP throttling YouTube at night without a VPN
They cap video streams at 480p between 7 and 11pm in my area (Nashville), so I started routing traffic through DNS over HTTPS on port 443 and the throttle vanished. Has anyone else tried this, or found a cleaner fix that does not break other stuff?
The "port 443" part is the real trick here and you can push it way further than just YouTube. ISPs throttle by looking at what kind of traffic it is, so the second everything looks like normal HTTPS on 443 they lose the ability to tell a video stream from a web page. You can do the same thing with a lot of other stuff, like gaming traffic or big downloads, by tunneling it through port 443 instead of letting it go out on its normal port. Problem is some ISPs have started using deep packet inspection to sniff past the port number, so it works great until your provider upgrades their gear. If that day comes, you would need something like a Shadowsocks or WireGuard setup on port 443 to keep fooling them. Test it with a speed test at 8pm and again at midnight to see if the throttle is actually gone or just hiding.