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I have been considering the issue of speed. Let me explain. For some months now I have had an issue with PIA and Proton both being slower. Or at least testing slower. Then I have had Trend Micro VPN that began running at full rated speed. Over the years I have used and occasionally speed tested VPS that I use. There was alwats a lag in speed when compared to not usig a vpn. Usually VPN to VPN was comparable in lag and speed. With the recent experience with the two VPN services that I trust (PIA and Proton) vs Trend Micro, where Micro suddenly goes full speed. I consider that service to be broken or compromised. For the time being I use the two services that I trust.
Are you actually seeing a reduction in speed when it is requested in transit protocol? How do you know that? Can you now not stream video in HD? Will YouTube not deliver 4K when it is listed as an available format? What are you actually seeing?
What if the VPN uses aggregate data from their data center. This data could be telling them what average data looks like. They may not even be using their own data to make these data profile identifications. That kind of data must be commercially available all over the hardware conventions that service providers go to at least once per year. What if the average connection in the United States is 50 Mbps? My speed test on a good for the past three months has been sometimes on a good day 150. My actual speed is a multiple of this. I do not torrent or deal in files often enough to speak with any experience on server transfer speed to me. I am just a point and click end user. What I can say is that the recent activity that I have experienced is effecting three different VPS that I use regularly in a consistent and significant manner. I consider Trend Micro to be compromised for the time being. They have no transparency and a VPN should never operate at full connection rated speed.
Here is the conclusion that I have come to with Proton and PIA. The VPS knows who the speed testers are. The VPN knows that speed testers map the tests that they make. The VPN provider sets the service to respond with the most common test profile for the server that the user is connected to. The provision of a generic speed reduces the fingerprinting of the connection of the larger internet. The VPN would likely also have data on all of the top commercial servers that serve data on the internet. These servers provide that data to IT professionals so that equipment requesting data can interact in the proper way. The servers see X% of data requests and completed transfers with 50Mbps connection speed. The commercial server will SYN ACK with that as the first round of negotiation with the initial connection. This gets logged. The connection is stabilized and the log is no longer focused on the connection. The VPN says, ok it has been 90 seconds connected to Netflix. VPN will now make a 200Mbps request to the server. The server will make adjustment. VPN will accept and end user now has 4K. The protocol of throttling and logging initial connections helps cloud providers protect the Commercial server from malicious denial of service type attacks. The VPN adopts the 50Mbps initial connection to protect the user identities and prevent threat actors from using the service as a weapon.
If this does or does not make sense please respond. If I am full of shit it would be a god thing for me to consider further my assertion. Test the weakness of my conjecture. If you feel that this private idea of mine is convincing then it would be of assistance to know any details of your experience that you can share to help me understand what part of the elephant I have my hands on over here in the dark. So, good or bad I am open to feedback.
I suppose, technically, a court could order them to begin collecting information. But, they physically cannot do so. A court order can’t make them collect logs any more than it can make me fly.