topic Re: Does EE limit VPN speed? in Archived Posts

Does EE limit VPN speed?

alfienoakes — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 14:28:39 GMT

Hello, I have fibre at home, windows 10 PC, currently getting 70-75 mbps.

I signed up to Norton 360 VPN - with VPN turned on I only get 36-38 mbps.

I'm waiting for their customer support to get back to me.

Just tried a trial of Avast VPN - getting the same 36-38 mbps.

I am expecting some slowdown using a VPN but this seems excessive.
Is there anything anyone can suggest?

Re: Does EE limit VPN speed?

pip11 — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 15:42:50 GMT

EE do not limit VPN speeds.

Re: Does EE limit VPN speed?

alfienoakes — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 11:55:04 GMT

I guess what I'm asking is whether there any EE customers that use a VPN with a smaller slowdown? A 50% reduction is crazy.

Re: Does EE limit VPN speed?

Christopher_B — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 12:23:06 GMT

Hi @alfienoakes

I hope you're well and having a nice day, are you up to much or just having a chilled one?

You will always see a loss in speed when connecting to any VPN, this is due to software having to encrypt every packet of data.

I would suggest trying a few different VPN services as speeds can very with each one.

Thanks

Chris

Re: Does EE limit VPN speed?

alfienoakes — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 12:30:36 GMT

Thanks Chris
I know about the speed reduction but can't cope with a 50% reduction.
Before I try them all I was hoping someone might help with a good one they'd found.

Re: Does EE limit VPN speed?

pip11 — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 09:16:51 GMT

I have no problems with Windscribe. You can download a free version to try it first.

Re: Does EE limit VPN speed?

alfienoakes — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 09:23:56 GMT

thanks. i'll give it a go

Re: Does EE limit VPN speed?

alfienoakes — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 21:12:51 GMT

Results so far

Norton 36

Avast 39

Tunnelbear 44

Windscribe 53

Still not great, may try others soon

Re: Does EE limit VPN speed?

mikeliuk — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 21:33:53 GMT

Hi @alfienoakes ,

Depending on how modern and capable your processor is, it's possible that the bottleneck may be your processor.

You can judge this by taking a look at processor load in taskman. Modern processors will have encryption offloading to ensure that is not the bottleneck.

VPN service providers may give guidance on what hardware to use to minimize the overhead and various types of VPN technologies are known to perform better. For example, I believe wireguard and ipsec might be preferable over OpenVPN. Good luck!

Re: Does EE limit VPN speed?

alfienoakes — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 22:30:41 GMT

Thanks Mike,

My processor is Core i5-7500 3.4 ghz, 16GB ram reasoable specs I think.

I just tried Malwarebyes vpn and got 41. Probably try expressvpn next.

My usual speed is 70.

What I don't know is what speed I can reasonably expect to get with a VPN?

Re: Does EE limit VPN speed?

mikeliuk — Sat, 24 Jul 2021 09:24:01 GMT

Hi @alfienoakes ,

Intel ark suggests that's a perfectly reasonable processor. It's a few generations behind but has a high clock and encryption acceleration in its favour.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97123/intel-core-i5-7500-processor-6m-cache-up-to-3-80-ghz.html

Things to check including that you observe the high clock rate and boost rate as you are testing your VPN speed.

Online sources suggest an overhead of 10% to 15% is reasonable.

One source talks through things you've probably already considered but dropping the encryption level should be a good sanity check. Unfortunately their speed comparison link is broken but there seem to be other useful things on their main page.

https://www.vpnuniversity.com/learn/vpn-speed

Re: Does EE limit VPN speed?

alfienoakes — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 12:48:16 GMT

As I suspected, there is nothing wrong with my pc.

Switched provider to Now broadband, new router - can now get approx 68mbs with Norton and Windscribe and I suspect all the others.