Slow VPN speeds.

Hello. I recently started using VPN in the UK, however, I noticed that I get very slow speeds when using UDP, TCP and SSTP protocols, but lightning fast ones when on L2TP. The problem seems to be unaffected by switching different server locations.

With UDP, TCP and SSTP, it still works fine, but I get several seconds of delay when internet browsing, for example. I run on Windows 7. I tried running UDP on my gf's laptop (Windows 10) and there it works fast.

Any suggestions on what the problem might be? I have very good ISP speeds and no viruses on my laptop.

Thank you and appreciated.

You need to first determine if you're experiencing high ping times or packet loss. First, run a trace route to your target IP. Some hops will time out because they are not set to respond to ICMP requests, these will simply time out. What you're looking for is something like this:

1 9 ms 8 ms 7 ms 99.178.16.80

2 8 ms * 7 ms 12.83.143.141

3 * 15ms * 12.122.112.121

4 16 ms 17 ms * 192.105.33.158

You can see above that four of the requests timed out (the * marks). You want to focus your attention on the earliest hop (hop 2 in this instance) that times out. Reason being, is all the other hops that appear to time out after hop 2 are most probably hop 2 dropping the request packets, it just shows up further in the test field (hops 3 and 4) because they were dropped by hop 2 en route.

Start pinging the earliest IP you see dropping packets, and maybe even the hop before just to make sure it's not occurring earlier and you just got lucky when you ran the test. Ping the suspect hop 100 times. So I would use the command:

ping -n 100 12.83.143.141

...to run a ping test 100 times on hop 2.

If it is just delay, you'll notice it in the response results, as follows:

1 9 ms 8 ms 7 ms 99.178.16.80

2 1526 ms 836 ms 1287 ms 12.83.143.141

3 1845 ms 1044 ms 1530 ms 12.122.112.121

4 2064 ms 1968 ms 2314 ms 192.105.33.158

Again, I have made the second hop here suspect. The high ping numbers from hops 3 and 4 are due to the delay at hop 2.

It's all about finding the earliest suspect and verifying it. Once you have done this, you will know if it's local (router/gateway issues, or even NIC issues...more common than you think) or if it's your ISP. If it's your ISP, you will want to tell them which hop you suspect (give them the IP), why you suspect it (high relay time or packet loss) and then cross your fingers that they fix it.