Anyone used a VPN to get around Traffic Management?

[simeonipicker]

After being heavly throttled constantly on 100meg BB I've seen posts on Virgins own forum regard VPN usage.

Does anyone use a VPN for the reason or just for privacy?

I'm interested in setting one up, what costs are invloved?

Thanks in advance

 

[MH]

One of my engineers does, and he says it is great. Unfortunately I am unsure of who the "provider" is.

 

[Captin]

There's another post on here where someone tried it and it basically sucked.

The easiest way to get round the traffic shaping is to download overnight, from 12 midnight to 9am, there is no shaping or capping at that time.

 

[Purity]

There's another post on here where someone tried it and it basically sucked.

The easiest way to get round the traffic shaping is to download overnight, from 12 midnight to 9am, there is no shaping or capping at that time.

It's the best way. Queue up downloads and start them from midnight ish

 

[ellie1998]

I didn't think they were supposed to cap the higher speeds ?
When the 50 mb came out it was not capped.

I'm behind the times still happy with 10mb

 

[oneman]

There is no download cap, but there is traffic shaping for newgroups and P2P in the evening weekdays and midday to midnight at weekends.

If you are using an external newsgroup provider then you can use a VPN but from what I have read the best VPN offer around 35mb throughput. If you use P2P then you can buy server in a datacenter that will be on 24x7 and then FTP (which is not traffic shaped) from that server. Not sure about cost but I suspect maybe around $15 a month to rent a small virtual server ?

 

[edogg]

I tried hidemyass provpn and when I complained to them that i was still being capped they said that a VPN does not work like that if i was wanting to avoid traffic shaping/capping from my ISP and in fact it was pointed out on here that a VPN actually increases your internet traffic because of the encryption they use

edogg

 

[mike_07]

Are vermin still trying to stop us using newsgroups? and are they still trying to cap 50MB?

The reason I ask is I haven't downloaded anything for a few days (and don't download lots maybe a few GB a week at most) when I try to download a file though my newsgroup it will only download at about 50KB!! and then starts to drop! BUT if I connect though my VPN I get full speeds!

A bit weird, with VPN they can't see what I'm doing but surly they can still see roughly how much data is being sent? in which case why the low speeds without VPN?

Just wondering why my speeds are so slow without VPN?

 

[gadgethome]

They do traffic shaping for p2p and newsgroup. I'm on the 100meg package usually get full download speeds (without VPN) but during peak hours it is reduced to under half. I noticed last night while downloading it was really poor using newgroups. Even with VPN during peak times, I'm not getting full speeds so not sure if they have managed to reduce or block some VPN providers.

 

[oneman]

They do traffic shaping for p2p and newsgroup. I'm on the 100meg package usually get full download speeds (without VPN) but during peak hours it is reduced to under half. I noticed last night while downloading it was really poor using newgroups. Even with VPN during peak times, I'm not getting full speeds so not sure if they have managed to reduce or block some VPN providers.

You will probably find that is your VPN provider that is the limiting factor on a 100mb service if its working fine without VPN off-peak

 

[nozzer]

VPN's wont really affect capping as thats set by a 'hard' data transfer limit regardless of what protocol you use. It can, however, limit your ISP from traffic shaping based on protocol so it can definately help when your provider decides to limit a particular protocol (p2p, newsgroups etc).

The main problem is that VPN is itself a protocol and is relatively easy to detect. That means ISP's will simply start to rate limit all VPN connections if they see that protocol as becoming a problem.

Generally, whilst a vpn may work to get around a limit presently I dont see that it has much of a future in that particular role so I'd tend to use it for what its actually meant for - privacy.

Of course, if everybody used vpn's then the ISP's would have absolutely no chance of protocol based control. The downside to that is that few vpn's will actually run at more than a few Mbit/sec and even fewer run at anything approaching 50Mbit/sec so the ISP's will still see a reduced data flow - they win either way !

 

[nozzer]

If you are using an external newsgroup provider then you can use a VPN but from what I have read the best VPN offer around 35mb throughput. If you use P2P then you can buy server in a datacenter that will be on 24x7 and then FTP (which is not traffic shaped) from that server. Not sure about cost but I suspect maybe around $15 a month to rent a small virtual server ?

You can get faster VPN's but they get more expensive (often more than what you would pay your ISP). The most economical i've seen is one that will give you around 45Mbit/sec for about $10 a month but such services are quite rare. Generally, a 50Mbit/sec capable vpn would set you back around $75 a month.

Your virtual server idea is quite interesting as I already done something similar. I have a small virtual server in Holland ($12 a month) on which i've set up my own vpn server (as well as quite a few other servers and some web hosting) which gives a throughput of around 30Mbit/sec. If you like fiddling around with linux etc then this can be quite an interesting and informative challenge. Another benefit is you can handle your very own domain name and handle all your own email (no reliance on VM/Google/Hotmail etc).