We usually find that most (but certainly not all) speed issues are down to the overall Internet link between our customers and our servers. We have had thousands of customers use our service over the years and you can usually predict the speed of a users connection based on their local broadband speed and their geographical proximity to our servers.
For example, a user in France on a 20Mb cable connection, connecting to our UK servers will usually get around 15Mb, the same would be true for most of Northern Europe. However a user in Singapore on a 100Mb cable connection, connected to the same UK server, would most likely get between 2 and 4Mb. This disparity is down to the speed of the overall Internet link between the users location and our server locations.
If you are having speed problems, the first thing to do is to try and quantify the problem and to do this we recommend that you use a speed test utility, our favourite one is www.speedtest.net
Go to the www.speedtest.net site and run a test without the VPN connected.
Speedtest will automatically choose the server located closest to you and this will give you your local Internet speed.
Next, close the speedtest window and then connect to our service.
Open the web browser again and go to the speedtest site and run the test again, this will automatically choose the speedtest server closest to our VPN server and will therefore test the speed through the VPN, the result will usually be a lot less than the first test due to the geographical distances involved.
Finally, without refreshing the speedtest page, disconnect the VPN and run the test again.
This will now test the overall Internet speed between you and the country you are connecting to, without the VPN and this is where we usually find most of the speed problems. That is to say, most of the speed problem we encounter are down to the overall Internet speed between you and the country you are connecting to, rather than a problem with our service.
It is always a good idea to run the tests several times, as Internet speed can fluctuate greatly so a single test result on its own is not reliable.
Once you have the results, you can usually see where the problem lies.
If your local connection is slow, all the results will be slow. In this case, there could be an issue with your local Internet connection, so get in touch with your ISP.
If the local test is good, but the other two are slow, it indicates a slow down on the Internet in general, this could be down to local congestion or even a fault in the Internet backbone. Unfortunately, there is very little that can be done to resolve this.
Sometimes changing ISPs can help, but we suggest you discuss this with other users in your country to ensure that the other ISP will actually be an improvement.
Finally, if the test with the VPN connected is significantly slower than the other, this would indicate an issue with the VPN somewhere.
In this case, try the following suggestions:
- Reboot your Internet router and your computer
- Remove and re-install the VPN software/setup
- Try using a different protocol, our service provides SSL, PPTP and L2TP VPNs, sometimes your local computer or equipment may not work well with one of these, so it is always worth trying the others.
If you are having problems, whether you have tried the steps above or not, please get in touch with us by sending an email to [email protected], we have thousands of users worldwide and will be able to advise you and hopefully resolve the issue.
