Your thoughts on my VPN speed

[DumbFalang]

I'm in Thailand and have setup my own Wireguard VPN in Las Vegas. With my VPN off, I went to speedtest.net and got the following results for my TOT internet connection:

 

Ping: 2ms

Down: 20.53

Up: 42.43

 

I'm a bit confused as to why my upload speed is more than my download speed, but I've been a bit out of touch with this kind of stuff for a few years, so there you go.

 

With my VPN enabled:

 

Ping: 200ms

Down: 17.31

Up: 41.20

 

The ping is as expected. I am pretty happy with the decrease in download speed - should I be?

 

I am very surprised (and happy) that my upload speed was barely affected. How does this compare with what you have experienced with your own VPN speed tests?

[DumbFalang]

After further research, I realize that things are not quite as simple as I first thought. This diagram gives a good overview:

 

 

So, the first speed test I ran with my VPN off, gave me an indication of the speed for only the 'User Internet' part of the above diagram (between me and a local speedtest.net server in Thailand).

 

The second test covered everything from the User to the speedtest.net server.

 

Did I miss anything?

[fdsa]

speedtest.net tests are very random with lots of interfering factors, to get a better estimates choose a single server for test (google for "100MB test file") and download it from the command line, first on your computer and then from your VPN server.

Also run ping and traceroute from your computer and your VPN server to some test server.

[fdsa]

1 hour ago, DumbFalang said:

 

 

actually ping times vary greatly because that's how Internet works - the traffic between one host (you) and another host (your target server) passes through multiple hosts in between - you could see them by running traceroute command - and these hosts sometimes are chosen very randomly.

their priority should be sorted by geographical location for faster access but sometimes the priority gets messed up either for anti-DDoS protection (I've seen traffic from Moscow, Russia to St.Petersburg, Russia going through Latvia, then Sweden, then back to Russia) or just by ass-backward system administrators (traffic from Thailand to my server in France goes through USA with ping time 300-350ms so I have to use a VPN in a neighbouring country to pass traffic through mainland only which lowers the ping to 150-200ms)

[dwagner]

My download speeds are lower than upload when the kids are up - if you have other users in the house, try and do a speed test when they are asleep or offline

[catturd]

I see speeds routinely >500Mbps using Wireguard on a ToT fiber connection (*500/200 pkg.) and about the same on True internet to servers in USA, east/west coast and in between. You should be seeing speeds much higher than your experiencing if you are testing on a fiber connection.

I test from cli using macbook and Cat6e.

[crazykopite]

I have express vpn if I turn it off and do a speed test my it is at least 3 or 4 times faster than when the vpn is on I have fibre optic from 3 BB 

[Mutt Daeng]

3BB 1000/500 fibre using NordVPN.

1st speedtest using VPN connected to Singapore.

2nd speedtest no VPN.

 

 

[DumbFalang]

Wow - you guys have some amazing speeds - are we in the same Thailand?

 

Ahhh... I just remembered, the missus told me our package somehow dropped down to the basic one from TOT and we haven't had time to contact them about it. I'm saving a few bahts, so I don't care.

 

Anyway, if I set you guys up with an account on my VPN, would you be willing to run the tests again so that we could do a 'side by side' comparison?

[codemonkey]

4 hours ago, DumbFalang said:

Wow - you guys have some amazing speeds - are we in the same Thailand?

 

Ahhh... I just remembered, the missus told me our package somehow dropped down to the basic one from TOT and we haven't had time to contact them about it. I'm saving a few bahts, so I don't care.

 

Anyway, if I set you guys up with an account on my VPN, would you be willing to run the tests again so that we could do a 'side by side' comparison?

Is your vpn server hosted on your home/business connection in LV or with a  hosting service? Nevertheless, Wireguard speeds are significantly enhanced over OpenVPN, IKEv2, etc and your d/L speeds are a direct function of your servers upload bandwidth.

[Thomas J]

7 hours ago, crazykopite said:

i have express vpn if I turn it off and do a speed test my it is at least 3 or 4 times faster than when the vpn is on I have fibre optic from 3bb

I have Nord VPN and I have the same experience.  Also confusing is most of the times my upload speed is faster than my download speed. 

[DumbFalang]

6 minutes ago, codemonkey said:

Is your vpn server hosted on your home/business connection in LV or with a  hosting service?

It is running on a data center in Vegas.

[Speedhump]

7 hours ago, Mutt Daeng said:

3BB 1000/500 fibre using NordVPN.

1st speedtest using VPN connected to Singapore.

2nd speedtest no VPN.

 

 

Nice to see someone using CLI for precision. Web overheads must have effect otherwise?

[nahkit]

6 hours ago, DumbFalang said:

Wow - you guys have some amazing speeds - are we in the same Thailand?

 

Ahhh... I just remembered, the missus told me our package somehow dropped down to the basic one from TOT and we haven't had time to contact them about it. I'm saving a few bahts, so I don't care.

 

Anyway, if I set you guys up with an account on my VPN, would you be willing to run the tests again so that we could do a 'side by side' comparison?

 

I recently upgraded my TOT package after the old one ended. I'm supposed to be getting 500 Mbs download and upload. Using the TOT speedtest, the actual figures are more like 50/20 so I called TOT to ask what was going on. A woman called up and asked my wife what we were using to access the interent, notebook, laptop or "big computer". Told her it was a laptop, ahh, came the reply, laptops can't go faster than 100 Mbs was what she said.

 

Told her I didn't believe her answer plus I'm getting 50 and not even the 100 she claims is the limit. Said someone would come to the house and check. That was a week ago, still waiting for them to arrive, must be coming from Phuket on a pushbike. (I'm located up in the North-East).

[nglodnig]

6 minutes ago, nahkit said:

Told her it was a laptop, ahh, came the reply, laptops can't go faster than 100 Mbs was what she said.

She might be thinking of the limitiation of the web-based Speedtest - when I was running it it said it couldn't measure > 100 Mb/s - download the stand-alone (non-web) version.

 

Which I did- and my (quite ancient) laptop hit 196Mb/s download and 31Mb/s upload - just now for example. I've seen it all the way up to 300Mb/s.

[nahkit]

On 5/26/2021 at 5:59 PM, nglodnig said:

She might be thinking of the limitiation of the web-based Speedtest - when I was running it it said it couldn't measure > 100 Mb/s - download the stand-alone (non-web) version.

 

Which I did- and my (quite ancient) laptop hit 196Mb/s download and 31Mb/s upload - just now for example. I've seen it all the way up to 300Mb/s.

Well she was quite adamant that the speed limitation was down to my laptop and Notebooks and "Big Computers" would get the 500 Mbs no problem.

 

Do you have a link to the stand-alone version of the TOT Speedtest that I can use, please? I'm interested to see if that makes a difference.

[Led Lolly Yellow Lolly]

She's probably making assumptions about the cabled LAN speed on your notebook i.e. 100BASE-TX as opposed to 1000BASE-T or it's variants, or a limitation on the WiFi throughput. For example, if you have a Gigabit package, you'll never see it if you're only connecting with a 100BASE-TX network card. Stupid really, modern notebooks will do gigabit speeds... but really, as already highlighted above, there are just so many variables end to end and you need a pretty high level of expertise to pin it down for an individual link.

[earlinclaifornia]

950/508 3bb with Goldenfrog VPN 111/50

[nglodnig]

On 5/27/2021 at 2:28 PM, nahkit said:

Do you have a link to the stand-alone version of the TOT Speedtest that I can use, please? I'm interested to see if that makes a difference.

Sorry I didn't see your reply or I would have answered sooner.

 

The same site speedtest.net has pull-down menus to load the stand-alone app on various devices.

[nahkit]

19 hours ago, nglodnig said:

Sorry I didn't see your reply or I would have answered sooner.

 

The same site speedtest.net has pull-down menus to load the stand-alone app on various devices.

Bit of confusion, I'm using TOT speedtest rather than the Ookla Speedtest. I did download the standalone speedtest version and gave it a try.

 

TOT speedtest                    up/down                               67.82/36.90

 

Web-based  speedtest  up/down                               69.83/36.37

 

Standalone speedtest   up/down                                79.64/25.96    

 

So definitely an improvement in the upload speed using the standalone version but in the overall scheme of things its pretty poor when I'm paying for 500 up and down.

 

I'm wondering if a wifi extender would help.