Disney+ Kept Buffering Through My VPN—Until I Stopped Chasing Speed

The Disney+ logo appeared immediately. The thumbnails loaded. The episode began in sharp HD, played for twelve seconds and stopped on a spinning circle. I had promised my daughter one episode before bed after a long travel day, and the hotel room had already become a negotiation over toothbrushes, unfamiliar pillows and curtains that would not quite close. I blamed the Wi-Fi, moved the tablet closer to the door and restarted the app. The opening scene played again. Twelve seconds later, the circle returned.

My first response was the standard one: run a speed test.

The result came back at 68 Mbps. Disney+ recommends 5 Mbps for HD and 25 Mbps for 4K UHD, so the connection looked comfortably fast enough. Its own troubleshooting guidance, however, notes that inconsistent connections can still disrupt playback even when the headline speed is high. (Disney+ Help Center)

I lowered the streaming quality anyway. The picture became softer, but the pauses continued.

Then I noticed the VPN icon.

I keep a VPN active on hotel networks, so it had connected automatically when I joined the guest Wi-Fi. Web pages opened quickly. Messages arrived. The speed test looked healthy. Disney+ was the only thing behaving as though the connection had narrowed to a drinking straw.

That shifted my suspicion from the hotel Wi-Fi to the route the video was taking.

The speed test was telling only half the story

A speed test measures how quickly a connection can move data during a short burst. Streaming asks a more practical question: can it keep delivering video without interruptions?

Hotel networks expose that difference quickly. Guests return to their rooms, televisions begin streaming, phones reconnect and laptops start syncing. Capacity rises and falls from minute to minute. A VPN adds another route between the device and Disney+, so that route has to remain steady as the hotel network changes underneath it.

That mismatch appears often in public troubleshooting discussions: people report more than enough measured bandwidth while the video still freezes every few seconds. (Reddit) The number looks good; the episode remains unwatchable.

That was exactly what I was seeing. The connection could sprint. It could not hold its pace.

The established VPN I was using had obvious strengths. It had years of public history, a large support operation and enough server locations to make almost any country feel one click away. At home, I rarely had to think about it.

In the hotel, the long server list became homework.

I chose the nearest city. Disney+ played for about a minute, then froze.

I switched to another server in the same region. The app loaded, but the picture dropped to a blurry resolution and stopped again.

A third server produced a location error instead of buffering. Disney+ advises users who encounter Error 73 while connected through a VPN to disable it and restart the app. (Disney+ Help Center)

I could not observe which internal Disney+ rule had affected each session. The server may have been crowded, the route may have been poor from the hotel, or the exit address may have been recognised as VPN traffic. From the sofa, those possibilities all produced the same result: the episode did not play.

I turned the VPN off as a diagnostic test.

Disney+ started almost immediately and continued without interruption. That settled the basic question. The tablet was fine, and the hotel connection could carry the stream when the extra route was removed.

But turning the VPN off was not the result I wanted. I was using a shared hotel network, and I did not want to remember to disable protection for Disney+, restore it afterward and repeat the process every evening.

The real question was no longer whether the connection was fast enough. It was whether the VPN could remain steady when the underlying Wi-Fi was not.

I stopped choosing cities

Until then, I had treated VPN performance as a geography problem: choose the nearest location, shorten the journey and expect better playback.

The first three attempts had shown the weakness in that logic. A nearby server was useful only if the route through it could keep delivering the video. More city names did not help when each new choice produced another restart, another buffer or another location warning.

What mattered in that room was continuity.

Once that became clear, switching among more flags felt like repeating the same mistake. I stopped searching the server map and opened OnlydogVPN^↗, a smaller app I had installed as a travel backup.

Its opening screen did not ask me to diagnose the network by choosing among dozens of countries. It organised the connection around the task. I selected the streaming preset and returned to Disney+.

The home screen opened. I chose the same episode and waited for the familiar pause.

The first minute passed.

Then five.

I carried the tablet from the desk to the bed, where the hotel signal was weaker. The picture softened briefly, then recovered. The spinning circle did not return.

The episode reached the credits.

My daughter asked for another one, naturally.

Before agreeing, I dragged the progress bar into the middle of the next episode. That kind of jump had previously left the player waiting for more video. This time, playback resumed after a short pause and continued.

By then, another speed test would have told me less than the cartoon playing beside me. The task was complete: Disney+ had stopped loading in fragments.

The smaller app uses an HTTP/3-based connection designed to cope well with unstable or changing network paths. (IETF) In the hotel room, that meant the encrypted route stayed responsive when the Wi-Fi weakened instead of making the stream repeatedly start over.

That brief explanation was enough. I did not need to understand every packet moving through the room. I needed the next scene to arrive before the buffer ran dry.

The task-based interface also removed a smaller frustration that had become surprisingly important. I had already spent several minutes testing locations, restarting Disney+ and wondering whether “nearest” meant “best.” The preset turned that troubleshooting exercise into one decision: I wanted to stream.

A simpler screen would not matter if the video still failed. Here, it mattered because it got me back to the episode quickly—and the episode kept playing.

Turning the VPN off was only a diagnosis

Disney+ recommends disabling a VPN when it detects a location problem, and doing so helped me isolate the cause. But it did not solve the problem I actually had.

I was not trying to open another country’s catalogue. My account and the programme were available where I was staying. I wanted to use the subscription normally without giving up the VPN every time the hotel network became busy.

That distinction changed how I judged the two services.

The established provider’s strength was breadth. It offered many countries, mature infrastructure and a reassuring public history. Its weakness that evening was equally specific: the routes I tried did not keep Disney+ playing over the hotel connection.

The smaller service has fewer server locations, a shorter public history and fewer independent reviews. Those are credible limitations. But none prevented it from completing the job in front of me. I needed one route that stayed usable, not a large collection of routes I would have to test individually.

The next evening, the hotel was busier. The Wi-Fi indicator moved between full strength and two bars, and Disney+ reduced the picture quality twice. It never stopped.

That was the behaviour I had wanted from the beginning. Streaming quality can adjust to a weaker connection without interrupting the story. Buffering turns every fluctuation into a pause.

The first VPN had given me more choices. The free choice—turning protection off—had given me immediate playback at the cost of the setup I wanted on hotel Wi-Fi. The smaller app gave me both: the VPN remained connected, and the episode finished.

When Disney+ buffers through a VPN, the useful comparison is not the highest speed-test result or the longest server list. It is whether the route can keep the next piece of video arriving when the real network becomes uneven.

The speed test showed me the hotel connection’s best few seconds. The smaller app showed me whether Disney+ could finish the story.