VPN speed

FishFish

When I do an internet speed test on my BT ISP I get about 9 Mbps download which is a lot better than I got with Talk Talk but of course could speed either up if I went for a fibre connection.

For work I use a VPN and noticed that this tripled the download speed and doubled the upload speed. This was with the exit node in the UK, Japan or several European sites that the VPN provider used.

Both of these providers promise not to throttle connections and of course who would dare to accuse TT of being a bunch of liars but I suspect this is the case.

Any better ideas?

wilberforce

Higher vpn speed may be result of compression which vpn providers use to push more data through the vpn tunnel.
You would not have similar compression on your normal isp connectivity

FishFish

Many thanks for that which makes sense.

moarspeed

How are you measuring the bandwidth? ISPs normally remove all throttling to commonly used bandwidth testing websites, making it impossible to get any real idea of your true bandwidth.

As for connecting to work VPN, your data is encrypted, the ISP can't throttle because it doesn't know what the data is.
Business connections aren't normally throttled, so connecting via that effectively gives you an unrestricted connection.

If I want to download a large file from one end of the UK to the other (say a server in Manchester, to my home in Worcestershire) I actually get better bandwidth by connecting via a Swedish VPN. Yes that's right sending data across Europe and Scandinavia is faster than downloading directly inside my own country.

FishFish

Well ok I do use Ookla to do the test but as you have confirmed the rate goes up by a multiple of three when using Ghost VPN - uk exit node or even Japan node! But not possible to say if they are throttling or not or remove the throttle for Ookla but I get a similar result with Acrylic. I use a VPN for work and for security and for internet access in China and have upgraded from Talk Talk - ieee 802.5 n to BT - ac which helps even more but I don't need to use large files so practically the speed issue is less important than the encrypted tunnel.