Horrendously slow VPN download speed on Quantum Fiber

VPN
1

This has been driving me nuts for the entire day. I work remotely as I just relocated for my job, I must use a VPN to do work.

Quantum Fiber was installed a few days ago. I noticed that all websites that use VPN to my company were very slow. So I SMB’d to my box at my company site (over in WA, I’m in NV, I’ve always been able to easily RDP to it over VPN and transfer files via SMB even when I lived in VA). The download was very slow at around 500kbps, when I should be getting at least 50mbps if not more.

I then switched to Opera GX browser and did a speed test with its builtin VPNs - all 3 from Asia, America, and Europe were very slow. I tried to download VS Code from Microsoft on all 3 VPN and all 3 had the same exact download speed of around 30kbps. They all exhibited classic throttling where the DL spikes in the very beginning then quickly gets throttled down to 30kbps, this was very apparent with the American VPN as it spiked to 1MB/s for a second.

My wife also works remotely and her company uses a VPN. She barely uses it though, if ever, but I did another file transfer test to one of her company’s mapped drive and that too was painfully slow to download.

Strangely enough if I upload files to my computer remotely, the VPN is able to transfer full speed. Even the Opera GX VPN speedtests all had 200mbps+ upload speeds. Makes no sense at all why upload is fast on all the VPNs but download is extremely slow.

For what it’s worth I’m located in Las Vegas. Just wondering if anyone has CenturyLink quantum fiber and their company’s VPN is working fast? Is anyone here in Vegas that can test their company (or any other VPN) speed to see how fast it is on their CenturyLink connection?

I am considering signing up for Cox to get a cheap plan to see if Cox is affected.

Another test I did was set up my iPhone as a 5g hotspot and connect to its wifi with my corporate laptop. The VPN was fast with that, go figure. It’s gotta be CenturyLink at this point…right?

Already called support and literally argued with the person that ALL VPNs do not work and when I use them outside of CenturyLink they work fine. They would not escalate my issue and kept saying “it must be some antivirus blocking something”, I hung up out of frustration.

2

Normal CL fiber (no quantum here in Denver area) and VPN to my company is lightning fast. Speedtest while in the VPN runs at 250 mbit symmetric which is as fast as our VPN server goes. I also run a WireGuard vpn server on my router (don’t use CL’s box) and it works fantastically from anywhere in the world. We travel a lot for work and family. Clearly no throttling here. The numbers shown here make me think there is something more fundamentally amiss with your connection than the ISP throttling.

3

Update: CenturyLink reconfigured something on my ONT (or on my account, not sure which) and also said there was some sort of “outage” in my area, issue is fixed. Glad to see I wasn’t going insane.

4

I hate to say it but in Vegas there is some weird shit going on… they are definitely throttling the whole connections not just vpn

5

So when I connect to my work VPN server that I know can do some serious VPN throughput since it’s hosted at a very beefy colocation, I know for a fact that it has a very beefy connection and sometimes I have to download very large files from it and upload to it. Usually I can get about 70MB down and about 80 up when doing a ssh transfer with scp or sftp recently as soon as I start my uploads and download I can barely get 20MB down and 10UP now mind you when I connect to a different ip for the same server I get my 80MB a sec speed, for a bit then it starts to taper down.

6

Another oddity: when not on the VPN any speedtest I try they cap out at 10mbps, but upload is blazing fast at 900mbps. Steam downloads at like 85MB/s…why would CenturyLink want to throttle speed tests?

7

CenturyLink fiber, Nord gives me 900/900 both ways.

8

I just found this thread after 2 weeks of issues. I work remotely from home for the City and I recently switched from Comcast to Quantum Fiber. I was approached by a CenturyLink door salesman about the new fiber that he promoted as a CenturyLink product, only to later learn that Quantum Fiber acts independently of CenturyLink. Immediately the 1st day I can’t connect my work laptop through the VPN connection. I work with my departments IT team for 4 days straight until the finnaly said somthing to the effect of "Trace routes show the outgoing VPN signal being blocked at a “State Router” and they could not elaborate further due to not having access to those routers, they said that the issue was almost certainly being caused by the new ISP. Every time I call to express to Quantum customer service that I have an issue with VPN, I get the same scripted response to reset my router & that they have not responsibility to 3rd party process. They refuse to elaborate & even hung up on my tech person who was on the call with me. I’m at wits end right now paying for two providers at once just so that I can determine what the matter is about has been expensive and exhausting. If anyone has any insight to why this is happening please chime in. Otherwise I will just have to go back to paying more for Comcast & demand a refund.

9

Peering, network congestion etc matter here. “A phat pipe” has many factors.

With CL they continue to over sell bandwidth exhausted areas. Call and complain, and that is falling on deaf ears that cant help.

10

CenturyLink doesn’t throttle, especially speed tests. There’s is like a an issue somewhere that needs to get resolved.

Try running a wired speed test with your computer in safe mode with networking and see what you get. If you still get bad speeds, there is an issue on CTLs end

11

sometimes the ONT has a firewall that blocks ipsec ports. If you can gain access to allow ipsec ports or maybe do port forwarding ( risky)