I work in a sensitive role where I must log into a work vpn. My connection is way slower once on the vpn regardless of if using wifi or plugged in. My other devices are totally fine and do not use the mandatory work vpn.
Any ideas on how I can fix this?
Here’s why I think it’s a google issue…
I didn’t have this problem with Comcast.
Read online as well that some ISPs throttle Vpn
I am in Charlotte, WFH as a Cloud engineer and have used multiple VPNs to access customers and different lab environments without issue.
When you use a VPN having a stable connection is important, but your speed is dependent on the VPN gateway that you connect to. When you connect to the VPN the designated traffic is sent from your machine over the internet to the gateway over a secure encrypted tunnel. There are multiple types of VPN protocols/configurations that offer different performance levels.
So you may have 1gig internet service, but if your works VPN service only able to process and supports a fraction of that speed, and all your machines traffic is being sent through the VPN and not work specific addresses, you will be limited to the lower speed.
Could be a routing issue, Google and Comcast are going to route the VPN connection through different peers and nodes, so you might just be having issues with the location of your work’s VPN server being routed through a slow path. I see this issue all the time in SLC since certain services here route through SLIX which has issues during certain times of the day. The internet is incredibly complicated, and just because “I didn’t have X issue on X provider” doesn’t mean it’s caused by the provider.
Could you clarify this a bit? What exactly is slower? Just general internet browsing? Work applications? Did these same things run faster while also on VPN but over a different ISP?
This is most likely an issue with your VPN rather than an ISP issue. Sometimes work VPNs route all internet traffic through the VPN by default. Sometimes they may selectively route traffic ("split tunnel) through the VPN, e.g. by using domain whitelists. Sometimes, depending on the operating system you use and the VPN client you use, all DNS requests may be routed through the VPN to determine this. You are probably running into one of these cases. My work for example (by default) routes all DNS queries through the VPN, which makes all web browsing sluggish as the DNS queries themselves are slow, and even though the web pages themselves only go through the VPN if they’re work internal pages. However, once I disabled this (which is also a privacy concern) and manually configured what to route through the VPN, my internet connection was back to normal and the only things that were slow and sluggish were work-related pages that have to go through the VPN. This all depends on how specifically your VPN solution was set up and which type of VPN it is. Also, don’t rule out that their IT department misconfigured something or there’s some bad equipment, it does happen.
Never heard of Google doing this, but maybe someone else has. It shouldn’t really be a thing as many organizations use VPNs all of the time, and require their employees to connect to them as you said.
My experience with VPNs is they all are slower, depending on the health/distance of the server you’re connected to. You’re not going to get full gigabit speed when on the VPN.
There is so such throttling. You’re almost certainly looking at it wrong. It’s not “wasn’t a problem with Comcast”, it’s “wasn’t a problem X weeks ago.” Something changed that caused the problem but it’s almost certainly not your internet particularly when it’s same on wired network. Lots of things can change on the laptop through the same time. OS and software updates, newly arisen problems, etc.
I’m assuming Google’s router doesn’t have any kind of VPN handling bugs, if you’re using it. I don’t, and doubt there are such issues but don’t know.