Better performance using a VPN rather than without

[Milewire]

We have FTTP provided by Openreach and have had for a while. 

We both work from home. all traffic is fine, Teams etc, but during peak times we lose access to all social sites - "cannot connect to to server" etc.

I have raised a complaint, and I'm asking some questions here due to my lack of up to date technical know how on how the internet works.

We noticed that access to social sites etc was fine via our employer's VPN. So we signed up for a VPN service. (another quid a month on top of paying for more than the  basic package to try and mitigate the problem) Lo and behold - problem solved. No more "cannot connect to server" Download speeds have always been ok - upload speeds seem to have doubled now that we are using VPN.

Does anyone have the time and the inclination to explain this to me, so that I can better discuss this with EE?

Basically without the VPN, I'm not getting the service I paid for. There was no information in the marketing material that accessing social sites would be hampered during peak hours.

Reaching out in desperation, since all EE have done is try and sell me a 5G router instead of using Fibre.

[Northerner]

Hi @Milewire 

What are your content settings as these sound like the problem. 

Thanks 

[Milewire]

I’ve tried advanced web protect on/off parental on/off, all filtering on /off locally on devices. 
incidentally, upload speeds via vpn are double what they were, but they were seemingly ok anyway.

with two kids here, I don’t particularly want to disable filtering. 
thanks for the suggestion. 
I think my gripe boils down to the service not providing what it was supposed to be able to do, and the only ‘solution’ from EE has been to try and get me to ditch fibre which to my olden tech brain seems counterintuitive. 

[Matt_124]

Have you tried enabling the Compatible Wifi option to see if that makes any difference?

Cannot connect to server does sound like content filtering/restriction of some kind, what devices are you seeing this on?

[Milewire]

Thanks Matt,

It’s across all devices - various age apple phones, windows laptop, MBP. 
Another ‘feature’ of the issue is that it seems to coincide with the times one assumes are busy - post school up to 8:30 ish 

for the past few years, we’ve simply switched to 4G during these times. Issue isn’t new, but we nievely assumed that going full fibre gigabit would mitigate these kind of issues. 

I’ve changed the wifi to the ‘middle/comprimise’ setting - can’t remember what it’s called. 
One difference using VPN is that upload speeds have doubled.