My own PPTP or L2TP VPN on EC2 AWS, configuration help needed

VPN
1

In my summerhouse I have internet via 5G only. It works great, but there’s no public IP so when I’m away I can’t RDP to my PC. I’m using a ZTE MC801A router. It supports both PPTP and L2TP vpns. So far I managed to setup PPTP vpn on T2/T3 instance. Unfortunately the connection speed was mediocre. Normally I have 500Mbps Up/ 70Mbps Dn, but with the vpn I got (unstable) ~40Mb/15Mb. I’ve also tried to connect to the VPN from the PC directly, instead of the router, but the quality was the same.

So far I’ve tested bigger instance, t3.medium, but it didn’t change anything. It seems that t3.nano is sufficient? I have no success with L2TP yet. However, I’ve tested two commercial VPNs. The VPN tunnelling goes smooth via 5G, I’m getting about 480Mb/50Mb.

Any hint which EC2 instance should I choose, or what else should I configure in AWC besides opening the ports in VPC? I would prefer to connect to the VPN from my router, keep the EC2 instance always on, basically setup and forget, just to have a static public IP as if provided by the network operator. I don’t think RDP requires huge net speed, but with the current setup all devices behind the router are having slow access to the internet, which is unacceptable.

2

PPTP is not secure and L2TP is not encrypted by itself – it’s often used with IPSec but alone it is not secure. I strongly recommend OpenVPN or WireGuard if possible.

The speed issues are difficult to solve without more information. You might try Iperf3 between the PC and VPS to see if the connection is good between them. ISPs often throttle cellular traffic.

3

Since my router support VPN I would love to use it for simplicity. Now that I’m thinking about it again, sure I can chain PI to the current router to setup whatever I need, so I can even skip VPN, just make a reverse tunnel. This way at least I’ll quickly test if my AWS config is suitable or if it’s the bottleneck.

4

Security of the tunnel is not my concern. If I had a public IP from my operator, I would just open a port on my router for RDP and rely only on the security of RDP itself. Setting up a tunnel supported by my 5G router would be just convenient.

Agree, it’s difficult to tackle the speed issue. Thats why I have tried other free commercial VPN solutions, none of them crippled the speed.