hi all. I’m new to VPNs and had a question. I’m in the US and considering PIA. I understand that the speed will be lower than my speed without a VPN when I’m at home. I’m wondering if the speed drop is related to the top speed available. If my house gets 10Mbps, but the VPN drops this to, say, 3Mbps, would it help to have my ISP bump my speed up to 15Mbps? Like, might that bump my VPN speed to 4.5Mbps?
The actual bandwidth overhead of AES-256-CBC is about 9%.
There are other factors to consider though, like the increased distance between yourself and your destination, peering between your VPN provider and your endpoint, and any traffic shaping going on.
IF the bandwidth is the limiting factor (it usually isn’t with drops in speed as large as you are describing), then increasing your speeds through your ISP will help.
You should not lose that much speed. Especially if your using light crypto like blowfish.
When I’m really rockin’, I get close to 95-98% throughput. Most of the time it’s closer to 85-90%.
I tested a number of providers (for a variety of things, one of which was speed). PIA was usually at the top of the list when speed was taken into consideration. Proxy.sh was another speedy one. EarthVPN was quick as well, though if privacy is a concern I’d stay away from them.
Distance from the VPN datacenter is going to be your primary factor in speed drop.
IMO, something else besides PIA is involved if you are seeing a drop from 10Mbps to 3Mbps. I would not consider that normal. Are you on a really old PC, perhaps?
As far as your question, yes, your VPN speed will always be a function of your ISP imposed speed limit. Faster ISP speed will almost always result in a faster VPN speed.
On the other end of things, I have a 20mb/s connection at my house (~17-18 mb/s actual) and speedtest just reported me at 60mb/s while connected to PIA. Any plausible explanation for this? I’m new to the whole thing. Surfing is noticeably faster than when not connected. My ISP does not throttle as far as I know, either.
Yep. Your VPN provider is using compression, and speedtest is sending you compressible data. Sadly there is no magic increase in speeds. 