VPN Slow Connection

Hey Guys!

I recently signed up for a VPN Service (privateinternetaccess.com). I currently live in Shanghai and get extremely poor connection to all available servers. Non-VPN connection is fine (well, given the circumstances).

After a long time trying and talking with customer support, I still couldn't get any significant performance improvements.

I am particularly interested in getting a connection to Switzerland. Now, the weird thing is that using my university's VPN connection, I get at least 5-6 times the speed, which means that it cannot be a general connection / routing problem.

Does anyone have any idea what could be the cause of these issues? 

What speed do you pay for at home?  When you say university's VPN, do you mean when you used the VPN at your university?

I do live on campus at a Shanghai university and I am trying to get a good connection to Switzerland, where my home university is. Now, the general speed to Swiss servers is okay / acceptable without VPN and using my Swiss university's VPN I can even stream YT videos more or less smoothly.

This is not the case when using the VPN connection from 'privateinternetaccess.com'. I can barely load sites and YT videos are just impossible. I am wondering why that is, since I think that the traffic should be routed similarly.

Even connecting to their closest server, which would be Hong Kong, doesn't give any significant improvements.

A VPN, from my understanding, tends to slow down your internet by a few megabits. Not an issue if you are getting somewhere between high 20's to 30 megabits a second. If you speeds are much less than that then you will see a noticeable difference because there is less bandwidth to play with. That could explain your issues

Yes, I know that there is a slowdown using VPN, but that's not the issue. My problem is that the VPN service offered by PIA is that much slower than my home university's VPN, even though the servers are located in the same country. After optimizing the connection by disabling encryption and following their advices, I still get nowhere near as close to the performance I get with the other VPN connection going through my university.

Now I wonder if their servers are just overloaded or if the problem is on my side. I will try a little more but I'm probably going to ask for a refund.

Here's the difference.

PIA = $40 a year

Your University's VPN = $Alotmoremoney a year.

If their general performance is like that for all users, nobody would pay for their service.
So no, that's not the difference. Since I heard a lot of good reviews about them, even from Tek Syndicate, I highly doubt it's the maximum performance they offer. It might be just my location here that can't get better connection, which I can accept, but then I will be forced to look for another service.