I get 550 megabits on speedtest.net. However when I go to battle.net or steam to download a game, I only get 2 megabytes per second. I know the connection is saturated because my latency goes to 4-500 and the response time of browsing other websites slows to a crawl or takes forever to load.
However, when I connect to VPN, select the location as my same city, suddenly I download at 40-50 megabytes per second, and the connection is not saturated.
What could explain this?
The reason is likely peering. Your ISP probably peers with a CDN, and that peering link has limited capacity. The VPN operator (or their ISP) may either have a bigger pipe to the CDN, or a bigger pipe to the Internet generally.
It’s not that anyone is trying to screw you over (most people seem to jump to this conclusion) - it’s just that capacity planning is a complex activity and sometimes the strategic “guesses” that are required miss the mark, sometimes due to missed details, and other times demand patterns change (new games released, CDN partnerships change, etc.)
Same here. I have Spectrum Wifi at home. Just changed my plan to basic 100 mbps plan, reason being the price went way up for 300 mbps plan I had. Actually the lady at Spectrum on the phone was the best service I’ve ever had honestly. I agreed with her to pay $60 a month from $100 with the 300 plan. But she went far and beyond, cause she got my bill to $29.99 a month, yep that’s right $29.99 a month!!! Locked in for 36 months, 3 YEARS! And no I’m not being paid to say this. I just couldn’t believe the bill went from $100 to $29.99 a month all because of the nice lady on the phone from Alabama. Anyways, internet speed went down to 100 mbps plan, no big deal, works great! I noticed when I use AVG app for VPN my wifi speed is + 200mbps and upload at about 20. That’s more than double the speed I pay for. When I turn VPN off speeds are at 100mbps. Does this happen to anyone else? Cause it says VPNs should slow your internet down not speed it up. I know I got off topic with the lady and plan prices but I just couldn’t forget the HUGE favor she did me.
Incompetence?
Speed tests are designed to test speeds. They are accurate.
Steam and battlenet are not those websites, they are designed to download things. You will always download games MUCH slower because they don’t give you unlimited download speed and your download is limited by your HDD or SDDs ability to read and write.
If we spent all day going through thousands of possible issues related to, “why is my speed x on this website but y on this website,” and “when I dance on one leg my download speed is .02% faster than when I scratch my left nose,” we would spend months on something that doesn’t matter. VPNs change a lot of things but honestly it would be too tiring to explain how why and what. I recommend just googling it and reading it.
Thanks. It’s been going on for a few months. How would I bring this up to Spectrum? Maybe provide some traceroutes? Would they even be able to do about anything this issue?
What’s the reason for being a douche?
You could try, but it’s pretty likely they won’t do much, outside their normal planning cycles. Keeping the pipe full (not using a VPN) would probably be the most helpful thing you can do, so that their analysis will show a need for capacity at the next planning cycle.
Rather be a literate douche than a literal idiot