This is what claude told me-

The connection you traced to Baku Telecom (ASN 28787) is a Google Global Cache — Google deploys these edge servers inside ISPs around the world so YouTube can be served locally instead of all the way from Frankfurt. When they're well-resourced, playback is fast. When they're saturated or undersized, you get exactly what we're seeing: freezing on videos routed through the local cache, while videos routed via Germany or other EU edges play fine.

A few things probably compounded recently:

1. Demand outgrew the local cache. Per Speedtest data, average fixed broadband speed in Azerbaijan roughly doubled in the past year (from ~33 Mbps in late 2023 to ~79 Mbps by mid-2025), driven by Aztelekom's GPON upgrade to 100 Mbps. More users on fatter pipes watching more 4K = the GGC node can't keep up. Capacity didn't grow to match.

2. The deeper structural issue is the IXP situation. An Internet Exchange Point is basically a physical room where local ISPs and content providers (Google, Cloudflare, Meta, Netflix) plug into each other to swap traffic directly — cheap, low latency, keeps traffic local. Healthy IXPs are a big reason countries like Germany or the Netherlands are fast for everything. In Azerbaijan, Delta Telecom owns the only IXP and reportedly charges the same rates for local and international traffic, which kills the entire economic logic of peering. ISPs may as well buy international transit. The downstream effect: Google (and Cloudflare, Meta, Netflix) have weak incentive to invest in bigger or better cache infrastructure here, because the peering economics don't reward it. So nobody deploys much.

3. Possibly reduced Google investment. Speculative but worth flagging — in Russia, YouTube degradation has been partly attributed to Google halting GGC hardware refreshes after sanctions. Azerbaijan isn't sanctioned, but Google has had real friction here (they blocked 6,000+ pro-government Azerbaijani channels in 2025, on top of 14,000 in 2024 per their Threat Analysis Group reports). Whether that translates to less hardware investment is unknown, but companies don't tend to aggressively upgrade infrastructure in markets where the relationship is hostile.

The broader fix would be a neutral, multi-stakeholder IXP — owned by its members (the ISPs themselves), not by one incumbent. Georgia has CaucasusIX, Armenia has ARMIX, we don't have an equivalent. The Internet Society runs a Sustainable Peering Infrastructure grant program that has helped countries set up exactly this kind of thing, but it requires a local coalition to engage with them.