I have Comcast’s “Blast Plus” Service which advertises download speeds of 105mbps in my area, and upload speeds of 20mbps. When I am NOT connected to a VPN (for anonymous browsing, security, etc.) I max out my bandwidth at all the major testing sites (Ookla, speakeasy, etc.) at 25mbps. However, when I connect to VPN service (in this case, “privateinternetaccess,”) and run the tests again at the same sites, I get between 108mbps and 88mbps download speed. From everything I know, that is completely out of whack. My speeds should be lower when I’m connected through a VPN. Is there any way I can check for sure which of these is correct?
My guess is that the speed test is not measuring the speed end-to-end across the whole VPN tunnel. It’s only measuring the speed to the machine that’s serving as your proxy. It’s just going to the first hop. Since the VPN provider has higher bandwidth than you, the speed test thinks you’re cooking along at that speed. In effect, though, your speed will never be higher than whatever your ISP is giving you at the time.
Find a big file online and download it when you’re connected to the VPN and when you’re not. Clock both downloads (clear your browser cache between attempts so your machine doesn’t cheat). See which one is faster.
That’s my guess. I’m reasonably net-savvy, since my day job is writing code for routers.
BTW, it might not be as simple as throttling your specific connection. They could be throttling all the users of a given class in your area, and your VPN somehow avoids that (puts you in a different class). There may be some bottleneck that your normal data path hits, that the VPN traffic does not for a variety of reasons. It might simply take a different path that just happens to miss the bottleneck, or the VPN traffic could be given precedence (if the VPN is to a company that pays for it with the service provider where the bottleneck is, for example).
Your method is more likely to be misleading, if the big file in question might be cached, so you’d have to pick a big file that’s not the kind of thing that would get cached. For example, don’t download a google app as a test.
Also, speed tests generally designed to test the full path, since that’s what matters, and they generally give you options for various locations to test from. (And it’s actually rather hard to build a test that tests only the first hop, without the cooperation of the service provider.)
VPN does change the route… because the VPN server is elsewhere…
Direct may be via a congested path, everyone using it.
VPN puts your traffic onto uncongested links ?