Getting poor UDP speeds but ok TCP speeds!?!

[rbuilder 0]

I just signed up to test out the service, and ran into a few problems. Ping times are fairly low (say < 30ms). When I run my tests for speed performance (speedtest.net, or testmy.net), when I am running UDP it is much slower than expected. An estimate for without VPN is about 35mbps. With UDP through AirVPN (any port), it is 15mbps. When I switch to TCP, it gets up to 23mbps...probably a little lower than I'd expect but it is consistently better than the UDP connections. It's extremely odd that I get better performance with TCP than UDP - when I search online, almost everything says UDP will be faster, but that's not the case here.

Do you have any suggestions for making UDP work so that I can get better connection speed?

Thank you.

[Jinsong 5]

My guess is that your ISP is prioritizing TCP packets over UDP (traffic shaping) to prevent excessive bandwidth consumption, in which case there's not really much you can do about it except perhaps try the non-default ports (53 or 80). Having said that, I wouldn't consider your UDP speed to be "slow" by any stretch of the imagination... 15mbps is still incredibly fast for a VPN server. :cheer:

[Staff 9972]

@rbuilder

Hello! Jinsong is right, probably your ISP shapes some or all UDP ports so you get better performance with TCP. This is becoming a common practice because these ISPs see UDP packet shaping a way to:

- increase overselling without investing in infrastructures

- hide anti-competitive practices to make their own content and service delivery to their customers more attractive than those of their competitors (VoIP, A/V streaming etc.)

- test their customer base for acceptance of walled-gardens, a business model aimed to dismantle the open Internet. Apple huge success, which shows that majority of people will support enthusiastically a company that actively fights to dismantle the open Internet and open source software, this model is now very attractive.

Kind regards