openVPN slowness

[drj2]

Wife needs to connect to OpenVPN for work (in uSA). Recently upgraded to newest modem and gigabit speed when we ran into the speed issue. Not sure how long its been going on. She is pulling 20 to 40mb download speeds while on OpenVPN, without the VPN she is rocking 700-900mb, hardwired in. Her IT says her work requires 90mb for speed.  She is the only employee on the rogers network, the slowest the other employees see on this VPN is 150mb . I took her desktop to a friends house with another ISP and saw the VPN connect at speeds of 175mb. The companies IT keeps telling me to get rogers to whitelist the VPN IP. Techs i have talked to say they don't do that.

OpenVPN is set to use UDP, AES-256-GCM, no compression.

I use other VPNs for my work which use the wireguard protocol and see speeds around 350mb.

Getting desperate, has anyone ran into this and was it fixable?

*** Edited Labels ***

[RogersTony]

Hello, @drj2 

Welcome to the Rogers Community Forums!

I can understand how important it is to have fast speeds on your devices. 

If you have not already, please attempt a factory reset of the Rogers modem and see if the speed issues are persistent when the VPN is connected.

We look forward to hearing if this helps you.

RogersTony

[Datalink]

@drj2 before you do any modem resets, what modem are you using?  Here's Rogers reference page for their modems:

Internet Support - Help and Support - Rogers

If you're running a Hitron modem, then you're out of luck.  VPN data rates thru the Hitron modems have always been capped and have been a problem to boot.  

If you're using the black Ignite Gateway modem, you could have the Arris version which is built with a Puma chipset.  That's the same processor that is used for the Hitron CODA-4582 modem.  

Only suggestion if you have one of the above modems is to switch the VPN to TCP/IP instead of UDP and give that a try.  I wouldn't bother resetting the modem as it won't do anything for this situation.

[drj2]

Thanks for taking the time to review. I had an ancient rectangle modem but when i found out about these problems immediately bumped up the speed knowing i would  get a new gateway (infinity XB7 Technicolor CGM4331COM). Since bumped the speed up to a gig in a futile hope of addressing the issue.  Consistent speeds of 30 is what i'm seeing on the VPN.

I have tried every combination on the openVPN setting with no improvement (including UDP, which is what i have it set to as a default).

I was checking out the hops on the rogers network to get to the IP of the vpn, but not connected to it. I'm getting crazy packet loss (90 -98%) in Chicago @ ae2.3608.ear7.Chicago2.level3.net. It seems to be pretty consistently routing me to the spot when i'm trying to hit the IP of the vpn, Chicago is the last hop before it hits the VPN down near Washington.  I have brought it to rogers attention in my ticket, and my hope is that node gets removed from the routing table. 

I'll admit I'm outta my depth here, just grasping at straws trying to save the wifes job and as a nerd I take it as a challenge to figure out.

[Datalink]

Sounds like you're chasing this down as best that you can.  You really need to be talking to a Level II tech, or perhaps one of the moderators.  This really needs to get the attention of the network engineering staff, or the Network Operations Staff to see if someone can chase this down.  

At the end of the day, given that your wife if trying to connect to an outside IP address via VPN, (and that probably doesn't matter), I suspect that the response might be, "oh, its outside of our system, therefore we're not responsible", even though VPN performance throughout previous years can probably be described as abysmal.  

Are you running just the modem, or do you have fibre service which then feeds an XBx modem?

If Rogers can't fix the problem, or refuses to, perhaps you should approach Start or Teksavvy to see if they have better performance with VPNs compared to Rogers. Tell them they have a potential customer if they can guarantee a minimum of 100 Mb/s over OpenVPN.  

You indicated that you're seeing 350 Mb/s over Wireguard.  Is that running on a router or on a pc?

[drj2]

I have no officiation with the company my wife works for. Their IT staff have been little help and frankly don't seem to care. Why the . they aren't using wireguard protocol i shall never understand.  I live out in the country, so i got the ignite gigabit service as its the only game it town (besides starlink).  I have a coax cable that runs from outside, directly into the x7 gateway, then its a 5 feet run of  cat6 to the wifes desktop.

I took my development machine downstairs and hardwired into the x7 and conducted speed tests on perimiter81(wireguard) and nordVPN (flipped to openVPN protocol) and both saw results from 300 to 450 for speeds. I cant match the location to which her OpenVPN resides.

Far as i understand Rogers has a routing table for their traffic and they can exclude nodes from the Hiway. I don't know why i'm always stuck hitting that particular Chicago spot.

I'll let the ticket percolate in the system for a few days, as long as the wifes company knows we are working on a solution then i have bought some time. I will update this chat when i hear back, in case someone else is travelling this almost lonely road.  Merci