My 350Mb connection is throttled to 10Mb

[ProTofik]

Hi,

I have been Virgin Media (and NTL) customer for the past 12 years. Starting with 2Mb/s connection, I went through multiple upgrades, currently at 350Mb/s.

In the past weeks or maybe months, I have noticed that as soon as I turn torrenting on any computer or server in my house on, the WAN download connection drops to 10Mb/s flat on every device in the house (total). On top of that, I experience massive, 25% packet drops (tested by ping -t 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8). Turn torrent off, and bam, problem solved.

My SuperHub 3 is setup in modem mode. My edge firewall is virtualized pfSense 2.4.4 and VLAN routing is done on Cisco 3560CX. Pretty basic setup that works fine.

Has Virgin Media introduced some sort of policy recently that throttles customer's connection down to make it feel like 2007 again for torrenting, or is my SuperHub 3 modem acting up?

Paying over £50 for 10Mb connection does not seem like a good deal for me any more. There are unthrottled 70/20 options out there for half the price.

[Moogera]

I have tried 3 different VPN and the speed in UDP mode is 800kb to 1.4mb Max

Switching the VPN to TCP protocol increases the speed to up to 30mb download

That's what I use now always

[Topbloke]

was sadly reported I think about 6-7 months ago by ispreview site reviewing the hub4, someone in the comments said their hub4 was still showing the same latency and puma chipset faults but it was a little better than the hub3 just like outcasst above said.

There are still wild theories (mainly on Reddit forums) that Virgin Media simply covered up the pumagate/latency flaws by claiming it was officially fixed with a firmware update others say and show this not to be the case and another wild theory out there is Virgin Media are secretly throttling UDP packets on the OpenVPN protocol or basically throttling VPN users.

You don't need to be a rocket engineer to test out the theory, anyone can free trial a VPN provider with Wireguard protocol and see no issues with speed or connectivity with torrents or any protocol.

Far easier to just ditch Torrents and go to Newsgroups.

[Topbloke]

Moogera:

That is very odd, all vpn providers use udp protocol by default since it's the fastest protocol while tcp being much slower since it has to do error checking.

I wish I had the opposite effect !

[Topbloke]

Apologies for my mass posting, virgin media forums still dont have a quote button and quick reply is not tagging the member or quote in properly, can't even edit or delete post on here either.

[Moogera]

I changed it because one of the VPN help team said in their opinion the Hub was at fault so I changed to TCP

[Topbloke]

moogera:

yeah VPN providers advised me to try tcp also, also to try adjusting mss fix settings but none of them worked well.

Its possible the upcoming openvpn 2.5 final version which supports kernel acceleration may give us a speed boost and some stability to openvpn. Either way Wire guard or try newsgroups is my best advice both options solved it 100% for me.

[saltyseadog]

Yes the openvpn 2.5 update allowed me to install the Wintun tunnel adapter to my Windows 10 PC. I use AirVPN and my download speed went from and average of 25-35Mbps to 130Mbps with the SH3 in modem mode running through a Linksys EA7500 router.

[Topbloke]

saltyseadog:

Hi that is excellent news and good to see your speed increase but do you get the bad packets or authenticate/decrypt errors or 10Mb cap when torrenting ?

And has the new openvpn 2.5 solved this issue ? 

[Topbloke]

saltyseadog:

Hi that is excellent news and good to see your speed increase but do you get the bad packets or authenticate/decrypt errors or 10Mb cap when torrenting ?

And has the new openvpn 2.5 solved this issue ?

[saltyseadog]

Everything works as it should now.  My Virgin broadband package is 215Mb which I get all the time when not using the VPN. When using AirVPN I get 125Mb which gives me over 12mbps on a download using qBittorrent this will download eg a 4GB file in approx 15 minutes.