My home wifi is throttled at 5 mb down (or less). Running Speedtest on my PC verifies that. But if I connect my work laptop to the same wifi and connect to the work VPN (Cisco Connect Secure), I’m running more like 30 mb down. Is there a VPN service I can use personally that will bypass the throttling for my home internet?
Thanks!
StG
This makes no sense at all.
Data is data, so the VPN should actually slow things down - there’s something else going on.
Agree that it shouldn’t help, but I usePrivateTunnel for my home VPN needs. It is quite cheap.
beowulff - I test my laptop with the VPN (about 29 mbps down) and with the VPN disconnected (4.9 mbps down), as well as my home PC (same as with VPN off). I have a private VPN for my PC (TunnelBear) and it doesn’t change the speed.
StG
Is the speed measured at work, or at home?
Does your employer not mind you using his bandwidth?
What ever you value, you should compare it to other VPN provider. PrivateTunnel is not the cheapest, I think PureVPN is.
Check yourself: http://comparisonvpn.com
I’m using IBVPN myself. It does it job well. If you need a lot of bandwidth, they even have few torrenting servers with bigger bandwith.
I’m working from home today and my employer doesn’t mind me using the internet. And it’s MY internet, since I’m paying my internet provider.
StG
All of those seem to have a “per month” price. PrivateTunnel charges by amount of data transfer. I put $12 on it a few years ago and haven’t spent it yet, which beats $2/month hands down.
VPN does not inherently increase bandwidth and in fact decreases it slightly, as has been pointed out. The way VPN works is that instead of directly accessing a resource through your personal connection, you use your personal connection to connect to the VPN endpoint, and the VPN endpoint routes your requests to the resource. Thus, the VPN endpoint is an extra hop in the path.
You need to contact someone who is familiar with your home and VPN configuration, such as your workplace network administrator. It is possible that your particular work-VPN has some additional technology in-place to do network acceleration, but acceleration is not a VPN technology in-and-of itself. And it sounds like you want a faster connection/acceleration, not necessarily a VPN for its own sake.
You pay your internet provider for your bandwidth, but since your VPN routes your connection through your workplace , you are also using your employer’s workplace bandwidth while on VPN.
I’m no expert but is Speedtest measuring the connection to the workplace and not to the OP’s home?
Which should impact latency, but not bandwidth (unless the additional hop were to introduce a bottleneck, but that’s unlikely.) However, VPNs do introduce another layer of encryption, which can make the usable bandwidth slightly lower.
I think the bandwidth to and from his employer’s router is being tested.
If by “to and from his employer’s router” you mean from Speedtest to the employer’s router, then we are in agreement.
Yes.
I could not explain it to a user, nor that she was stealing bandwidth from the state. We had a VPN to the state network to see some sensitive data, and she believed it to bet faster than her home ISP, and wanted to cruise the web with it.
Yes, Speedtest is fooling you.
It’s like putting a Ford Pinto on a cargo jet then bragging about how well it can fly.
The answer to the OP is probably no. Find a better ISP.
Unfortunately, ISPs are few and far between in rural America. I don’t have access to cable ar ATT, just wireless from phone companies. I’m trying to maximize what I can get.
So basically somehow the work VPN is tricking Speedtest? Is there a way of telling what the speed really is, then? I’ll ask the IT guys when I go back into the office.
StG
My guess is that it is a VPN split tunnelissue. In a split tunnel, traffic that should go to the internet takes the normal path while traffic that goes to the computers in the VPN network take the VPN.
If your I.T. guys didn’t set up a split tunnel, the internet traffic will traverse the VPN connection and the speed test may be testing from the company router to the remote connection which would lead to a higher speed being reported.
Slee
If you are using speedtest through your VPN, it is reporting how fast the connection from work to speedtest is. Your traffic must still go through your regular internet connection at your house. Using the VPN to browse will be a tiny bit slower than your home connection since everything goes from say, CNN to work and then to your house.
Sigh. I thought maybe I found a way to speed things up.