A bit of background first if I may. I live in the British countryside, and my download and upload speeds are awful. But, from what can gather my speeds are disproportionately bad in comparison to my neighbors’ speeds.
I recently had an engineer round to fix the broadband after a couple of weeks of it not working, (it was their fault at the exchange he said) and whilst he was here I got him to run diagnostics on my download speeds, and he found them to be around 4mbps (which if I’m right in saying is around 1mb/s). In reality, I get 1/4 of that. Since he left before I could explain that I wasn’t achieving that in actual download speed, I just decided to get on with it. In a few months fibre optic will be coming to our area, so I can wait until then.
Now, I thought that was the end of it, but I recently decided to bite the bullet and succumb to my paranoia by buying a VPN. The weird thing is, since I’ve been using it, my speeds have actually improved. Previously my download speeds were around 190-210kb/s, but now my download speed is coming out at around 310-330kb/s.
I’m glad it’s faster, but it’s also rather worrying. From how I thought (probably wrongly mind you) VPNs work, this wouldn’t be possible. I’ve heard about throttling and such, but I know next to nothing about such things. Can any more learned individuals give their opinions about what they think could be going on, please? I’m now a bit worried that my speeds will continue to be awful when they install fibre optic into the area.
Test your speed using testmy.net
They are more accurate than speedtest.net as they don’t use compressible data.
Compare off the VPN and on the VPN.
If you still get better speeds on the VPN then your ISP is throttling you. Depending on your VPN, you may be able to select different servers to connect to. Try a few different ones and speed test them to see what gives you the best speed.
If the difference is only a hundred kb or so, then they might not be throttling you, it might just be congestion on your isp’s connections.
Edit : If you have normal ADSL right now, then you have a copper cable going from the exchange to a green box near your house and another cable from the green box to your house.
They will have to physically put fibre cable between the exchange and the green box. Your speeds would be limited by how far you are from both the green box and the exchange, depending on how far they install the fibre.
If they only install fibre to the exchange, which sounds likely given you live in the middle of nowhere, then the most you can expect is 30-40 mbps if you aren’t too far from the exchange.
If they are doing fibre to the green box, you should get 70ish mbps.
There are 8mbps in a megabyte. So 1MB/s is 8mbps. if the engineer said you are getting 4mpbs, then you likely will only see a max of 350-375KB/s do to additional losses and overheads.
EDIT 2 : If you go into your modem/router and look for connection statistics, there should be something called Line Attenuation or somthing similar. It will give you a number in -db. What is that number?
I also notice speed increases. However during peak times the vpn drops a bit lower.
Weird since im connecting to Germany…from Australia.
There can definitely be an increase. VPNs can be configure to compressed data.
If the speed is low enough, compressing and transferring the data is faster than sending it uncompressed.
If the speed is high, it can be the opposite since the compression will be the bottleneck.
It’s possible that your ISP throttles data to certain websites or services. I know for a fact Comcast is throttling speeds and sometimes even disconnecting users from downloading stuff off of Steam in certain sections of the Northeast. The problem immediately went away after connecting to VPN since it’s encrypted and ISPs can’t see if it’s going to some site or server they don’t like. This is all Dependent on your country and ISP of course.
It’s generally not really possible unless 1) your provider is throttling you, or your download speeds are particularly slow and/or your testing your speeds on speedtest.net (schills for the ISP’s). a better download test is usually via command line (wget etc) or using a site that uses HTML 5 (not flash).
I also saw a speed increase. Increased to the speed i actually pay for. Fucking comcast.
I got the same… “issue”? i don´t know if it is a problem or a benefit
It only happens sometimes to me