[SOLVED] Does VPN slow your connection down?

[Mr_Furball]

My girlfriend got a job recently and she has to do it home office. With this, she's using a VPN to use the company's system and all. For now, it's just training and she's on a call on Microsoft Teams with a lot of people. Maybe that can be the cause, but anyway. On my PC, I've been experiencing some issues during the time she's working. On internet testes, the latency is low (13 ping) the speed is accurate; just the upload is lower than it should, but I think that is unrelated because it stays like even after she's done working, but some apps are having trouble staying online. Steam is not a problem, I can download full speed, etc, but GOG keeps saying that I'm offline and no matter how many times I try to connect, it won't. The page for the internet test shows low ping and high speed, but sometimes it takes so much to start the test that you think you'll get 200 ms, but no.

Does anyone have any idea of what can maintain low latency and correct download speed, but take longer to load pages and even stay online in some apps?

 

[jeremyj_83]

My girlfriend got a job recently and she has to do it home office. With this, she's using a VPN to use the company's system and all. For now, it's just training and she's on a call on Microsoft Teams with a lot of people. Maybe that can be the cause, but anyway. On my PC, I've been experiencing some issues during the time she's working. On internet testes, the latency is low (13 ping) the speed is accurate; just the upload is lower than it should, but I think that is unrelated because it stays like even after she's done working, but some apps are having trouble staying online. Steam is not a problem, I can download full speed, etc, but GOG keeps saying that I'm offline and no matter how many times I try to connect, it won't. The page for the internet test shows low ping and high speed, but sometimes it takes so much to start the test that you think you'll get 200 ms, but no.

Does anyone have any idea of what can maintain low latency and correct download speed, but take longer to load pages and even stay online in some apps?

Depending on the settings from the VPN server, it can cause all internet traffic to go out over its portal. Note that only the traffic from her computer would be affected by the VPN tunnel. I do know that if she is having video calls with her company that can take up a lot of bandwidth. I also know from first hand knowledge that just a voice only teleconference caused an internet outage for a company due to the program taking all the bandwidth. Anyone who wasn't on the call go the scraps of the available bandwidth. You might have to go into your router and make some QOS changes to limit the bandwidth that things like Microsoft Teams can use.

 

[bill001g]

Since your traffic does not go via the vpn it will have no direct effect. Most vpn is using a method called openvpn. This can if you work at appear exactly like HTTPS traffic to avoid filters. Even if it isn't it still more or less appears a a fairly standard encrypted web session.

So it would have the same effect as some other service that transfers a lot of data via web pages.

It all depends on how much bandwidth you have from your ISP and how much bandwidth the VPN is using. You should be able to see the utilization numbers by looking on the PC running the vpn in the network tab of the resource monitor. As long as it is not using most of your capacity it should have no direct effect on other machines on your network.

Now if the vpn is running on the router itself or if you are concerned about the performance of the machine that actually is running the vpn then that is a different set of conditions.

 

[SamirD]

Sounds like she is just eating nearly all your upload bandwidth. Simple solution is to throw more bandwidth at it. Usually fixes it too.