Testing out a VPN, the difference to speed and stability is quite dramatic

[Lethn]

So as you probably know now I've been meaning to get a VPN for quite some time and finally got round to testing one that was recommended to me https://www.tunnelbear.com/ , I'm convinced that my ISP virgin media is almost certainly throttling me because the connection tends to overreact a lot to things I do, everything slows down more than it should when I download and so on. They also are rabid in blocking torrent sites and so on as any other customer will tell you. What's surprised me is that the difference in speed is very dramatic, I think they have been deliberately targeting my connection because of how much I use bittorrent, so I fired up TunnelBear and all of a sudden everything is working way smoother than it ever has.

I'm definitely paying for one properly now I can afford it because I don't even need to use proxies to get to places which is great and I bet regions won't be restricted either for me because I can switch my location to the US no problem. Holy crap it's ridiculous, but yeah, I was suffering quite a bit this week with my connection and gave a call to tech support which lasted 54 minutes. They were very evasive and the guy was a classic indian tech support who even tried to claim that he wanted remote desktop access, in the end all he wanted to do was change my router firewall settings. He even had the balls to claim that asking something like that of a customer was completely normal.

Anyway, what are your experiences with VPNs when it comes to connection speeds? I keep wondering if this will fix the ping spike problems I have in gaming because I'm more and more convinced now it's bandwidth throttling given the boost in performance I've gotten. Turns out by the way, it has basically fixed all the problems with my connection, they were in fact throttling my connection a huge amount, I tried tunnelbear at first but private internet access seems the way to go for torrents and gaming which is what I tend to do most.

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[LiteCoinGuy]

i dont use a VPN at the moment. do you know cyber ghost?

TOR is enough for me.

how much do you pay?

[Lethn]

$6.99 a month, honestly, considering how much of a difference it makes to me it's worth it though and I don't really consider that to be a huge amount anyway, haven't heard of cyber ghost

But yeah, smooth browser when torrenting and very stable ping on my games, they've been fucking with the connection for years like I suspected, if you experience slow speeds despite having 10mb or higher it's probably worth a try even just for a month, just to see if there's a difference.

[LiteCoinGuy]

$6.99 a month, honestly, considering how much of a difference it makes to me it's worth it though and I don't really consider that to be a huge amount anyway, haven't heard of cyber ghost

But yeah, smooth browser when torrenting and very stable ping on my games, they've been fucking with the connection for years like I suspected, if you experience slow speeds despite having 10mb or higher it's probably worth a try even just for a month, just to see if there's a difference.

quite good. how much upload is possible?

(and by the way: how much upload would you recommend when running a full node?)

[Lethn]

$6.99 a month, honestly, considering how much of a difference it makes to me it's worth it though and I don't really consider that to be a huge amount anyway, haven't heard of cyber ghost

But yeah, smooth browser when torrenting and very stable ping on my games, they've been fucking with the connection for years like I suspected, if you experience slow speeds despite having 10mb or higher it's probably worth a try even just for a month, just to see if there's a difference.

quite good. how much upload is possible?

(and by the way: how much upload would you recommend when running a full node?)

I honestly have no idea, I only just started testing yesterday so I'd have to ask people about doing some proper diagnostics, the thing is, the standard speed tests out there clearly don't detect any throttling going on so I'm going to have to do some research to check it all out. I can tell you though, when in battlefield my ping varies between 30 - 50 on average depending on what server I connect to I think but it's incredibly stable meaning I get much smoother gameplay than I could before because I'm not getting frequently disconnected or triggering any ping limiters.

To put into perspective how much of a problem ping was for me, I was getting anywhere between 100 - 300 even on UK servers and it would erratically change between that, causing lots of warping and such until I finally ended up getting disconnected by the ping limits, either that or it would just get so unplayable I'd have to quit, especially on matchmaking where a smooth connection is a necessity, even on the low resource games like counter strike these ping spikes would happen.

All of this was definitely a result of bandwidth throttling I'm sure, just surprised at how much of a difference it makes.