Throttling on VPN?

[ajsuenb]

Hi, for a while now I've been having issues with my speed randomly dropping to 10 mbps from around 350. It happens only when I'm connected to my VPN (ProtonVPN) and was wondering if there was any kind of throttling happening?

Two websites I've found that cause this every single time are twitch.tv and decathlon.co.uk, whenever I start to load these websites my speed instantly drops.

Normal speed:

When on Twitch:

The speed goes back up to normal 15-30 seconds after leaving the websites.

And here's when I start to load decathlon.co.uk too:

I've been in contact with the VPN company and it seems like it isn't on their end, I don't know how long it has been happening for (I guess around a month and a half). I did have my Superhub replaced a few months (?) ago. I've tried in router mode, in modem mode with another router and still have the same issue.

Any idea what's happening?

Thanks.

[legacy1]

Its unclear if VM are the problem or the VPN your using try another sever.

ping is low which would suggest not to be VM and that the VPN is doing QoS/BWM

[ajsuenb]

Hi, thanks for the reply. I think that was just a hiccup at that moment, here it is on 3 different UK servers on the VPN, usually the ping is low, just wasn't in those pictures.

[Client62]

Why are you using a VPN for twitch.tv and decathlon.co.uk ?

Do twitch.tv and decathlon.co.uk work perfectly without a VPN, 
i.e. have you established these websites are not the root cause of the problems ?

[ajsuenb]

Yes, Twitch and Decathlon work fine without the VPN.

I was told by ProtonVPN that the issue doesn't seem to be on their end because they couldn't replicate it on their end through testing and it only seems to be on my end so they wanted me to contact Virgin Media to see if there is any kind of network issue happening. 

[Client62]

You already knew that ProtonVPN was the issue. But you rejected ProtonVPN as being the problem.

The Post Office Horizon project comes to mind !

[IPFreely]

VM have absolutely no idea which websites you are using via the VPN which is presumably the whole point of using it.

[amihail91]

Hopefully not too old of a bump.

I was extremely surprised to find a thread that outlined the exact same problem I was experiencing, I was able to narrow it down to browsing Twitch.tv while on ProtonVPN! I don't think the problem is on ProtonVPNs side either, tbh.

I have tried with a fresh router firmware install and fresh Windows install, with a 3rd party router with Virgin in modem only and Virgin as the full router and I can recreate this behaviour every time. Was there any further information here or was somebody looking into it? I can recreate getting ping spikes of 500ms and speed locked at 1mb/s down ONLY after browsing to Twitch.tv with ProtonVPN on ... after a minute or so after closing the website everything returns to normal, there are other sites that show this exact behaviour also, so we can't say it's a Twitch routing problem or something along those lines.

[legacy1]

Try another VPN

[amihail91]

For now I don't have access to one - I will look into it.