Currently I have an ORBI 52 + 2 satellites connected to FTTB via an open reach Nokia modem. The connection is as fast as expected on all devices at approx 450mbps.
However, when my laptop is connected to my work VPN its connection speed drops to 25 mbps. All other devices not connected to the VPN are unaffected and still connect at full speed. An ethernet connection to the hub makes no difference.
For some reason the VPN connection speed does not reduce if I disconnect the Orbi and use my BT homehub 2 instead, which makes me think it's an issue with the Orbi setup.
I have tried disabling the orbi Armour, enabling Beamforcing, MU-MIMO, Fast roaming etc and it doesn't make any difference.
1. Can you please provide the latency time for when connected via Orbi vs when you are connected directly to the modem 2. Can you please also make trace route comparison for both cases. 3. Few VPN providers detect when you’re connected via a router (using ttl or MAC address) and think that you’re sharing the connection and therefore limit the speed. Can it be that your VPN provider is doing that? To test this you can test to set the MAC address of your PC as the MAC address of Orbi in the Orbi internet settings and see if that helps (if ttl count is used then this won’t help).
Another important aspect with VPN is fragmentation and packet sizes. The MTU size setting in Orbi might affect this.
You can check with your work IT on the type of VPN being used and the fragmentation requirements, but I would recommend that you change your MTU size to a max of 1460.
Thanks for the suggestions, I have played around with the MTU, ranging from 1430-1500 and the download speed doesn't change much, however the upload speed increases the higher the MTU is.
The ISP router which connects to the work VPN with no issues has an MTU of 1500.
I have also tried changing the MAC address of the router to match the PC but it didn't improve the connection.
Do you have any other ideas please?
I'm not sure how to test and make a trace route comparison of the latency but will try searching for a tutorial.
I think we still need to do more troubleshooting to understand the problem. 🙂 I assume that you are trying to connect to work VPN only from your work laptop:
Is the laptop's connection with Orbi wired or wireless?
What laptop model do you have and what is the model of the interface cards (wired and wireless)?
Have you tried from other devices? Do you see the same issue on other devices when connected to the same VPN?
Have you tried to connect to another VPN services and see if the same issue will be seen? You can try e.g. TunnelBear.
