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Over the past few months of using AirVPN alongside Virgin Media I have had nothing but issues. I am either unable to get the full bandwidth that I pay for, or my connection drops so frequently that it makes browsing almost impossible. I want to say a huge thank you to the AirVPN community and the people over at AirVPN as well for all of their support. I have learnt a lot over the last few months and I wanted to take the time to share my findings so that anyone else that had these issues could attempt the same things as I did and perhaps it will help you too. The Bandwidth cut Firstly lets talk about bandwidth issues. I have a fibre connection that without my VPN service I receive the 150meg I pay for. No sooner do I switch on the VPN I face drops of 75%. With the help of this post: https://airvpn.org/topic/12473-virgin-media-openvpn-low-speeds-throttlingbug/ rainmakerraw posted saying that by using the SSL protocols through EDDIE he was able to regain the lost bandwidth faced by using the VPN service. I figured this could work in the AirVPN program and after contacting the AirVPN team who advised changing this setting in AirVPN's protocols to SSL port 80 I saw that my speeds jumped to around 50% of my total bandwidth. For what I use the internet for, this was more than acceptable so I didn't mind taking a 50% cut so long as my anonymity was safe. METHOD: In the AirVPN program click the AirVPN logo in the top left corner: Next hit the preferences button: And then go to the protocols section and select the SSL port 80 radio button: This should now give you boost on your speeds while running AirVPN with Virgin Media. However, my story doesn't end there. The connection drop For a short time I was able to enjoy absolute anonymity and with only a 50% drop in service. I could live with this, until my connection began drop constantly. Initially this was very intermittent, and I simply disconnected from the current server and just hit reconnect. Issue fixed. However, this started to become extremely frequent, to the point that I was only able to browse for around 5 minutes before the connection dropped and I was shown a DNS error on websites I was trying to access. I could not seem to find anyone on these forums with the same issue, nor anyone with a solution. I knew that it had to be my ISP causing the problem as this did not exist anywhere else. However, I did find whisper on some other sites about Windows 10 causing problems with VPN services. It seems we live in a world governed by people hell bent on watching our every move, and at any cost they will try their best to succeed in this. Thankfully there are far smarter nerds out there capable of finding a solution. After a bit of searching I came across this post: https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/28318/warning-windows-10-vpn-users-at-big-risk-of-dns-leaks-2/ Which suggested that within Windows 10's group policies there was an option causing a few issues regarding DNS leaking. I had checked several times on https://dnsleaktest.com/ as well as https://ipleak.net/ as to whether this might be the cause of my problem but found no issues. That being said I wanted to add this here as I feel it could be of some use to people. Now, this is a guide for Windows 7 users but it works on Windows 10 (I will assume you are using this), however, it only works for Windows 10 pro. Windows 10 Home does not have the group policy software included, and after a little tinkering I managed to get it installed but there was no option to remove the "Smart Multi-Homed Name Resolution". So it didn't help me. However, if you have 10 pro, I see no reason not to include this as it could be an option. Never Give Up I wasn't going to be beaten that easily. I figured it was time to use the ol' process of elimination to figure out the cause of my problem, so I connected my laptop to my mobile phone via WIFI hotspot and with AirVPN connected I found there was not a single drop in a full 24 hours of web browsing. (Of course this ended up costing me a fortune but we live and learn). So then, my issue had to lie with Virgin Media. Perhaps then my Superhub was the cause. But if it was, where would I start? I figured is this was going to be any kind of software issue the firewall would be the place to look. Well by Jove I think I found it. Superhub more like SuperDUD As I type this I am now happily browsing the web at full speed, uninterrupted, and happy. SSL 80, no connection drop and I'm confident. The issue seemed to be with the PPTP and Multicast pass through. A little internet search and what should pop up as the top link: https://support.cultrix.co.uk/hc/en-gb/articles/202644875-VPN-Does-Not-Connect-When-Using-Virgin-Media-SuperHub A page regarding the issues this VM hub causes VPN services when these two options are not clicked. METHOD: Log into your Virgin Media Hub. For most of you this will be via the web browser and in the address bar you type 192.168.0.1 If this should not work refer to your particular hubs manual for the correct method, or using the sticker on the bottom of the router. Once in, you should see this screen: From here you want to type in the password to access the routers settings. I have changed mine so its no longer default, however, if you have never done this the password should be on the sticker on the router, but refer to the user manual to be sure. Next go ahead and click sign in and you will see this screen: From here we want to enter into the advanced settings option located at the bottom right of the screen. It may pop up a little warning but I assure you we are not doing anything that will break the router. On the following screen scroll down until you see the "Security" options: You are going to want to click on "Firewall". Lastly, on this next screen you should see the option for PPTP and Multicast Pass through as seen bellow. Go ahead and click both so that there is a tick in each box and then save the settings. If for some reason yours is already active, and you are facing the same issues as I am I am afraid I am at a loss as to what your issue could be. As I say, this is really just my own findings and this is as far as I got. The light at the end of the fibre Hopefully you should now be in the same boat as me, you should have a lovely consistent connection, with no loss of bandwidth and with the help of your lovely AirVPN service 100% anonymity. If for any reason these methods do not help feel free to post, perhaps this could be the central place for other VM subscribers and those using AirVPN. The small print Of course with any fixes like this they all come with inherent risks. I am merely showing you what I did and how, but please, do this at your own risk. I have had no issues doing this but I am not responsible for anything that goes wrong for you. Another note: Virgin Media from time to time release firmware updates and these can (and have) reset settings on Hubs. If you find that one day you begin to see the same dreaded drops and throttling, check the hub settings again in case they have reset them. I have seen many posts suggesting that turning the Superhub into modem mode and purchasing a router capable of the SSL 80 protocol in the routers settings is also an option. I have an old DD-WRT but its a little too old for the latest firmware and as such can not use the SSL protocol. This I think is a better option as it ensures anyone on your network is behind the VPN. But I am just finding the less expensive solution, not to mention there are far too many routers out there to determine which one can do SSL. Anyway, I hope this can be of some help to people with VM. Or if you have similar issues, maybe your router has these options, give it a go. Have a good day everyone. Updated 29/12/2016: *Title change*

I just now saw a post in my Telegram newsfeed which had this to say: VPNs targeted, throttled - Gov Jan6 Patriot witch-hunt? https://youtu.be/38za1LYj2XQ Here is the info undeneath the actual YOUTUBE video: HOW can ANYONE "throttle" VPN traffic if it is encrypted? unless they watch a certain port all the time??? And AirVPN lets us pick our own ports or sets apart isolated ports for us.... Why is this even happening?!

The essence of my question is whether anybody's had issues with an iPhone on iOS12 suffering very poor VPN speed on LTE? Some background.... iPhone 6s Plus. On iOS10 with the prior generation (v2.x) of OpenVPN, things worked great. I moved to iOS11, still with the prior generation of OpenVPN. The VPN aspect seemed to work well for me, but the overall phone performance was lackluster enough to motivate me into an update to iOS12. In a short period of time, I moved my phone to iOS12 and changed my plan type -- still AT&T -- from an ancient to a modern plan. Also the update to iOS12 required me to update OpenVPN to v3.x (3.0.2 -- 894 presently). The VPN connects quickly, no issues there on both LTE and Wifi. But once connected, I often do not get data access via LTE. The graph shows the Y-axis in BYTES per second. It seems I can sometimes close then reopen OpenVPN and it improves, or switch to airplane mode & back, or reboot the phone...but at best I get a day or two, often only a matter of minutes, where I get data. I am looking for help to diagnose the issue. I am inclined to believe it's a phone issue, because sometimes it seems to get stuck in some loop where the phone battery drains very quickly while also not providing data access. But when it *does* work, it works like I expect and battery usage is fine. I see nothing odd in the logs when it's burning battery. I backed up the phone and did a full DFU restore, and for 2 days it was bliss. Now I'm back to the same issues. Any thoughts/help?

I believe my ISP is throttling OpenVPN. I have been a very satisfied AirVPN customer and until recently got good speeds. In the last month, since switching to Fibre, I have noticed that OpenVPN connections appear to be limited to 1 Mbps. I have tried changing ports (53/UPD, 80/TCP, 443/UPD, 443/tcp) to no effect. I normally run OpenVPN on my router, so to isolate the issue, tried my other router that gives me full 15 Meg unencrypted while running the AirVPN windows client. In every case, the best I get is 1 Meg down and 10% of that up while encrypted. The change seems to coincide with my ISP "resolving" evening congestion problems in my area. The evidence seems strong that this is a throttling issue and not a configuration problem. Is there a solution or am I condemned to take the slow lane?

I'm with Virgin Media in the UK, on 160/12 cable. Last year I had a spate of low speed (3MB/sec hard cap) which I initially blamed on throttling of OpenVPN as I could hit full speed on my naked ISP connection. After some investigation I found it was actually a bug in the ISP supplied router, so I switched to my own and the problem went away. Lately however, I'm having a hard speed cap problem and it really looks like issues caused by either VM's use of DPI and/or OpenVPN throttling/shaping at ISP level. VM operate a whitelist for shaping, so unless the protocol is whitelisted it's shaped by default. VM categorically and publicly deny any form of throttling, shaping or interference with OpenVPN connections. I've been using an Ubuntu torrent as a speed benchmark as it's multi-threaded, consistently very fast, and can be used off-VPN without fear of legal issues. I have tested every port and protocol in Eddie, as well as via Viscosity (to rule out Eddie issues). I also tried the same tests with several other well respected VPN providers with good networks and the results were consistent across them all, Air included. Note that I am using MB/sec in its proper format, meaning megabytes per second. 1MB/sec = 8Mbps. All results are for the same Ubuntu 15.04 x64 torrent downloaded in the latest qBittorrent v3.2.3 on Mac OS X (also verified on Linux, PCBSD and Windows 8.1 Pro). As well as checking against multiple VPN companies, multiple OpenVPN software and multiple operating systems, I also reproduced the results on multiple machines (mid 2012 MacBook Pro and my FX8350 / 16GB DDR3 / Samsung Evo 850 sad / Radeon R9 380 gfx desktop). I repeated the tests with several ethernet cables (to rule out cable issues), as well as with *machine* > router > modem and *machine* > modem (to rule out firmware or routing issues). Every time, regardless of the variable, the results below were consistent. ISP : 19MB/sec OpenVPN 53 UDP : 2MB/sec OpenVPN (all other ports in turn) UDP : 5MB/sec OpenVPN (all ports) TCP : 4 - 5 MB/sec OpenVPN + SSH 22 : 2MB/sec OpenVPN + SSH 80 (or 53) : 13 - 18 MB/sec (lower in peak times, high off-peak) OpenVPN + SSL 443 : 13 - 18 MB/sec (lower in peak times, high off-peak) As we can see, generally SSL and SSH masking the OpenVPN connection allows almost full line speed (minus the encryption overheads). That's great. As soon as it's a bare OpenVPN connection the speeds cap out at around 33% of what they should be. Bare OpenVPN TCP is a little slower than UDP (as you'd expect) but otherwise in accordance with the general 5MB/sec cap experienced on UDP. The only exceptions are UDP:53 and SSH:22 which are both heavily restricted to around 2MB/sec. Now to my mind, knowing what I do of VM's shaping and DPI systems, this would only make sense if they were interfering with OpenVPN either by purposefully throttling it, or else their DPI system is messing up the connection. They further seem to restrict SSH:22 and UDP:53 by protocol but not by port. This actually makes sense, as all other Eddie combinations are quite random whereas SSH:22 (SSH) and UDP:53 (DNS) are established network traffic protocols and thus could be singled out for listing in the shaping systems. If we reverse the protocol/port (to give SSH 53 and UDP 22) we once again obfuscate the tunnel and go back to full speeds! I also get a lot of decrypt/replay errors in the logs on every single port for 'normal' OpenVPN. As soon as I hide the OpenVPN in either SSL or SSH the errors simply don't occur. Ever. This suggests that the extra tunnel is hiding the OpenVPN tunnel from being shaped, or else the DPI process in and of itself is breaking OpenVPN and causing the packets to arrive out of order. Maybe that in and of itself can hurt speed? So there you go. Sorry for the long post but it's an interesting (if thoroughly frustrating and annoying) issue. What do you gurus think? Given I have worked to change the variables one at a time to rule out issues with AirVPN (different providers), the router and/or its firmware (direct connection to modem, bypassing router), wireless issues (used ethernet directly) and OS limits or bugs (used multiple OSs) I can't see anything is left... except issues with the ISP shaping/throttling or else their DPI breaking things. I posted a thread very similar to this in VM's support forums, but for a whole week it has gone unanswered by any staff. Interestingly it is the only thread on the forum to have been ignored. Make of that what you wish. I await your replies with interest. Thanks in advance for reading.

Hi everyone, I know there have been speculatory threads on VM in the past, but I wanted to post some findings in case anyone finds them useful. I have a 152Mbps connection from VM in the UK and have noticed the following: Using the Superhub 2 and OpenVPN (443, UDP) gives a hard cap around 3MB/sec over ethernetUsing the Superhub 2 and OpenVPN (443, UDP) gives full speed on 5GHz wifiUsing an old PC running pfSense beta with the Superhub 2 in modem only mode removes the 'cap' and allows full speeds regardless of connection method I had been very frustrated by the 3MB/sec limit, especially when downloading torrents over OpenVPN (port 443, UDP or TCP) using a cat6e desktop PC. The limit applied in Windows and Linux equally and I'd eventually tracked down the issue to the Superhub 2. After switching into modem only mode and connecting through the pfSense box, I was able to get full speed regardless of the OS, and connection method (wireless or ethernet). Having switched back temporarily to the Superhub 2 in router mode (to set up a media streamer on the TV) I once again encountered the cap when downloading a Linux torrent (Elementary OS Freya Beta 1). This time I was running Eddie rather than OpenVPN GUI so I switched the connection to SSL Tunnel 443 and voila - full speeds! So either VM are throttling OpenVPN connections, or there's a bug in the SH2 which interferes with the handling of OpenVPN connections. Given VM's history of throttling and capping I would generally suspect the former to be true. However, I have noticed that even with normal OpenVPN connections (443, UDP) I get full speed over wifi but the cap returns when switching to ethernet. It seems the SH2 has (yet another) bug or issue in routing OpenVPN connections, and changing its firewall settings etc has no effect. Anyone on VM experiencing issues with low speeds would probably see good results from switching to the SSL tunnel. I'd be interested to hear back from anyone else having problems with their SH to see if this helps others. I could always stick to the pfSense box of course, but it's an old desktop which uses a lot of energy compared to a small consumer router box. My network isn't complicated enough to warrant the pfSense box unless it's essential - which now, with the SSL tunnel, it isn't.

Yesterday the VPN started to be very slow (below 2 Mbit/s download), and I had to turn it off all day long. When I tested it at night time, the speeds were normal again. Today, I had the same problem. Again speeds of 2 Mbit/s and less. So I made a speedtest hourly and created a log... 17:11 Download: 0.89 Mbps Upload: 0.86 Mbps18:14 Download: 1.53 Mbps Upload: 0.86 Mbps19:02 Download: 1.52 Mbps Upload: 0.85 Mbps21:14 Download: 1.84 Mbps Upload: 0.88 Mbps22:00 Download: 2.03 Mbps Upload: 0.87 Mbps22:50 Download: 2.43 Mbps Upload: 0.86 Mbps23:02 Download: 14.15 Mbps Upload: 0.87 Mbps I luckily made two tests in a row (within 10 min that is) at 22:50 and 23:02... You can see a sudden increase in speed.. I'm not sure what to make out of that. Without the VPN, the speeds are normal at any time.(This happens on every server by the way)

I'll admit I do not full understand how VPN's work so this question might seem very n00bish. Can you ISP restrict or throttle a connection to a VPN, click I've heard some ISP's restrict Netflix access.