NordVPN on new router. SLOW. Please advise?

Bought an ASUS RT-AX88U PRO AX6000, recommended from the NordVPN site. Bought nordVPN middle level service for 10 devices. When I added the NordVPN config into the router I noticed that my speed was about 1/10 of normal, down from 250M to something like 20. I let it pick a vpn server itself… and it is in the nearest large metro about 200 miles away. When I use the vpn client directly on my device it doesn’t slow down much if at all.

Please advise. Wife is pissed! lol

Routers hardware isn’t as powerful thus encryption is slower. Using VPN on devices directly will always be way way faster than our a router. Router option is only there if you want to cover the whole network so that even devices that cannot originally use VPN would be covered. If you do not need such even leveled security, I’d recommend sticking to individual device use.

Other than that there are plenty suggestions with commands that can help to increase the speed on router (there were previous threads but Google is your friend in this case) and you’d use UDP protocol for better speeds, but it won’t be ideal.

Flash the Asus to merlin then under custom config use something like this, replacing the xx with the servers you want to connect to. Every time the router reboots it will connect to a random server.

resolv-retry infinite
remote-random
remote xx.nordvpn.com 1194
remote xx.nordvpn.com 1194
remote xx.nordvpn.com 1194
remote xx.nordvpn.com 1194
remote xx.nordvpn.com 1194
remote xx.nordvpn.com 1194
tun-mtu 1500
tun-mtu-extra 32
mssfix 1450
ping 15
ping-restart 0
ping-timer-rem
remote-cert-tls server
pull
fast-io
cipher AES-256-CBC
dhcp-option DNS 103.86.96.100
dhcp-option DNS 103.86.99.100

push “dhcp-option DNS 103.86.96.100”
push “dhcp-option DNS 103.86.99.100”

I was about to buy that “recommended” router becouse I was geting 100Mbs, 1/10 my normal speed on my 8 years old Linksys 1900ACS. Instead I installed wireguard protocol… now, getting 700Mbps, 1ms ping not using the nearest server but one in another country… so, yes, you need to install wireguard protocol (not so easy since I have to install openwrt).

We live in hope one day Nord wake up and start supporting Wireguard

Oh yeh, actually I think I mistakenly selected TCP. I’ll have to see if that makes life more bearable. Thanks!

Thanks for the other tips. Not yet interested in flashing the firmware…yet anyway…. :-/

OK, so I changed profiles on my router with NordVPN to UDP (from the mistake of previously selected TCP), and am getting terrific speed now. Thanks for the suggestions. I am paying for something like 300MB, and I am getting about that when I run tests on fast.com now with the new UDP profile.

Thanks everyone!

That’ll be my next attempt of UDP doesn’t take the heat off! Thank you!

I’ll keep that in mind, thanks! Never heard of it, but here we go!

so, If you take a look, you have openvpn(TCP), openvpn(UDP), and NordLynx protocol, this one is the wireguard protocol. They provide configuration files for tcp and udp but not for NordLynx(wireguard) becouse a private key. Also, I dont think you can use the build-in vpn. That is the reason why I have to install openwrt. It’s tricky process if you don’t use linux because you need to run some commands to extract the configuration from the server.