Should I enable Video Data Extender?

Video Data Extender is designed to help users manage their priority data by shaping streaming video to lower video quality levels depending on their plan.

The benefit of the Video Data Extender (VDE) is that it works on all video streaming services automatically. The downside is that it sometimes causes buffering/freezing of video. If you are experiencing a lot of buffering/freezing, then I would recommend turning off VDE to see if this resolves your problem.

The data extender feature can be toggled OFF by going to my.viasat.com and turning it off.

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If this makes buffering go away, then you can leave it off but you’ll want to then keep an eye on your usage and you may want to manually configure your video streaming services to use lower video quality. This is explained in another post here.

Update: the problems caused by Video Data Extender are more often experienced for users with lower speed plans. For instance, a 12 Mbps speed plan is more likely to have buffering caused by VDE than a 100 Mbps speed plan.