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Comment by nvarsj | Hacker News Reader

I really like Mullvad, but I personally found the speeds to be pretty poor. It's been a while since I used it, but I remember not even being able to hit 100mbps download at times. On the other hand, in my experience, competitors can max out a gigabit connection.

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What ISP do you use if you don’t mind me asking? I’m on Verizon FIOS and I’m convinced they throttle certain traffic. I pay for 940mbps and generally get around 800 wired or 5-600 on wireless, but have noticed my speeds (on VPN) drop to 2-300. I do this dance with them every couple of months, get on the phone with support and just keep saying “ok yup did that still not seeing the correct speeds” and after a while they’ll sometimes say “let us try something on our end” after which speeds recover and stay good for a while til they start (allegedly) throttling again.

EDIT: I’ve gotten around 90% of my non-VPN speed through Mullvad FWIW

Some Mullvad servers are oversaturated at times, but I've been easily maxing a gigabit connection on Dallas servers for 6 months now. You just need to specify a specific server when connecting. If it's slow, try the next- generally higher #'s are better.

I've had this before and it can be "peering", which is much more obvious when you have a couple of different connections with different ISPs to test... i.e where one ISP will be much slower on the VPN, and only when using servers with a certain ISP on the other end due to peering arrangements between the two ISPs.

Mullvad tend to have a couple of options of ISPs across the servers in one location, and the couple of times I've come across peering I've always managed to find a combo that fully utilises my connection so far.

That's odd, I'm in London/UK and when I use Mullvad's London servers I can usually nearly max out a Gbit connection.

Interesting... maybe I should try again. I didn't have much luck on Virgin.

Some ISPs will throttle "looks like VPN traffic" on non-business lines. On the basis that VPN use is (apparently) a business thing.

Doesn't make much sense, but there's a lot of weird behaviour in the UK ISP business.

And as for what counts as "looks like VPN", I suspect they're just looking for GRE packets.

Could you share some of those competitors? I've tried a few VPNs which have not been especially fast, e.g. https://ovpn.com. Would like to find one that supports IPsec, which is supported natively by several operating systems.

FoxyProxy supports IPSec and OpenVPN.

PIA (yeah, I know they are owned by a dodgy company now, and I sound like a shill by suggesting them) does really well. No problem maxing a gigabit connection, and their peering is even better than my ISP a lot of the time - I get lower latency when playing games on US servers when using their network. I reluctantly signed back up after having speed issues w/ Mullvad.

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