Virgin Media Community

[BellaBells]

Hi Everyone.

I've been with Virgin for about a month now and am on the 1gb package with the Hib 5 All in all its been pretty good. I just installed my Surfshark VPN on my Chromecast and run a speed rest which shows I'm only getting 48MBPS on 5ghz WiFi network. So i tried Surfshark on my android 11 phone and it's the same, only 48MBPS. I've tried speaking to Surfshark on live chat but they have told me to do the usual change protocols and turn off virgin settings in security. Tonight I tried Nord VPN which is a bit faster but only 75MBPS on the Chromcast and phone. I understand I will lose some speed using the VPN but surely it should be a lot faster than this? If I use the chromecast and phone without VPN then speeds are fine. My xbox is getting about 920MBPS on speedtest.net

Any help would be greatly appreciated 

Thanks

[Client62 · Accepted solution]

Turn off all the VPNs and try this speed test to see the service speed to the Hub and the max speed you device achieves.

https://www.samknows.com/realspeed    ( this does not work with VPNs enabled )

Once you have understood if the service speed is good and what your device is capable of you can compare that to how the VPNs perform.

If the VPNs are very much slower don't be surprised, all you are testing is the shared bandwidth of a VPN exit node.

[BellaBells]

Many thanks for the reply. This is the test results on sam Knows without the VPN. My phone (Samsung A40) usually gets around 250-300mbps on Speedtest.net with no VPN but only about 48mbps with VPN active

[legacy1]

If ack suppression being a thing and VM not liking VPN one reason is VM calculate what a VPN packet size is for ack down a tunnel and rate limit them size packets causing low download speed.

[IPFreely]

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@legacy1 wrote:
If ack suppression being a thing and VM not liking VPN one reason is VM calculate what a VPN packet size is for ack down a tunnel and rate limit them size packets causing low download speed.

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This is wrong. It neither does happen this way or can. 

Ack suppression has no impact on the speeds of VPN services that use TCP over TCP as all the packets going to remote servers via the VPN will have payloads - has to be something inside each packet for the VPN service to know what you're trying to reach, can't just sent empty acks and expect it to know which flow they refer to. 

Any empty acknowledgments are communication between VPN client and VPN endpoint only and are not carrying traffic to remote services.

VM do not rate limit any size of packet. If they started rate limiting small TCP packets they'd break gaming and voice services for starters. The only limitation is the amount of packets per second that may be sent upstream due to the DoCSIS request-grant-transmit cycle, and concatenation helps a ton with this. 

Ack suppression on its own doesn't rate limit anything. Going by this post you neither understand it or TCP and shouldn't be posting about it to other customers who may not know better: your technical explanation is, frankly, gobbledegook and completely ignores the basic functionality of both ack suppression and VPNs riding over TCP.

I would suggest it's far more likely the VPNs are riding over UDP and hence taking the 'slow' path through the hub CPU that was put in place to mitigate the Intel chipset bug with DNS. Surfshark by default uses Wireguard, Wireguard uses UDP to avoid the issues that impact TCP over TCP regardless of the access network it's being carried over. 

[BellaBells]

Hi

Many thanks for the reply. Its all over my head lol. I've tried all protocols on surfshark and wireguard seems the best albeit 48mbps. I downloaded NordVpn trial and it's not that much better. Getting 90mbps on my phone and chromecast. Could you please give me any advice what to do next as Surfshark are blaming Virgin and say there's no problem on their end.

Thanks a lot 

[legacy1]

It's a little bit too convenient to blame Intel chipset bug? So does the user have a hub 5 I wonder...

[BellaBells]

I do have the Hub 5. What I've noticed is, if I route any random app via surfshark vpn then run a speedtest then my speed increases to around 350mbps on the chromecast and around 270 on my phone. But if I turn of route via vpn then I drop back to 48mbps. 

[legacy1]

Maybe test with hub in modem mode and test if the VPN mode can use TCP or UDP?

[BellaBells]

Thanks Legacy for the reply. I don't currently have another router to use to put the Hub into modem mode. Could you recommend a good router for gaming? Nothing to expensive if possible. Think I'm going to be stuck on low download speeds using vpn with virgin.