Johnster

My coworker has the same VPN service I do and he claims that he sees no degradation in his speeds when he enables it. I would be willing to believe that I am simply hitting the maximum speed for the VPN link except for the fact that with Bell, I was generally seeing speeds around 2.7MB down with the VPN enabled, with Rogers the fastest I've seen so far is around 1.5MB connecting to the same endpoints. I've spoken to the VPN tech support and they want me to try all protocols and ports that their client can use and if that doesn't work, they want screenshots of the speed differences. According to them, I should see no speed hit at all. Also interesting to me was that if I leave the secure NNTP protocol to the default of 583, the speeds were again degraded, but when I changed it to 443, they went through the roof. No matter what Rogers says, it looks to me like they are still throttling certain protocols. I was with Giganews for years, but ultimately, thier prices drove me to their competition. I had no complaints about thier service while I was with them though.

Thank you Ca3le for such an insightful and comprehensive reply. I did try some of the speed tests with my notebook plugged directly into the router, although the wired connections to the router are all Gigabit with handmade (by me) ethernet cables, I still wanted to be able to tell Rogers support that it was a direct connection. I have made some interested discoveries in my search for what my true internet speeds are. Please feel free to move this to another forum if appropriate. One of my biggest issues was that if I download files, I was getting much higher speeds than previously with Bell, but if i connect my VPN, the speeds slowed to about 10% of what I was getting without the VPN. In researching this I also discovered something interesting about my speeds as a whole; If I run the speedtest from speedtest.net using the default (usually a very nearby server), I would get around 150MB downloads, so far so good, but if I select a server in another geographic location, i.e. Maryland or Germany, the speeds would drop off to around 30MB, which coincidentally were the speeds that I was consistently getting with Testmy.net. It seems to me that TMN gives me a far more realistic "real-world" speed result that speedtest. Now my problem is what to do about these "real-world" speeds? Rogers will claim that they are responsible for speeds to/from them, and what happens on the other side of the connection is beyond thier control, but it could also indicate that thier back-end connections are lousy and that is where the speed drop-offs occur. What to do next? I'm still trying to get the folks at PrivateInternetAccess to help me find out why the speeds drop off so precipitously when I ceonnect he VPN (which they never did with Bell BTW), but now I also need to find out why my new utlra fast rogers connection is so poor outside my own geographic area. Any other thoughts and experiences are greatly welcome, and thanks again Ca3le, I look forward to supplying you with the data you mentioned. Cheers John

Greetings all. I just joined this site and am amazed at the differences between the speeds reported for my new 150MB Rogers connction here as opposed to the results I get on Speedtest. Here it basically max's out at 40MB down, whereas on Speedtest (which Rogers recommends of course) it shows 150MB. Rogers says they have never heard of this site, but my actual download speeds seem to be closer to the ones reported here than Speedtest. Can anyone shine some light on this for me? Similar experiences perhaps? Thanks for any help that you can provide. Cheers John