Sonic.net

We live in the Richmond District of San Francisco and got hooked up with our Sonic service on September 28th. The default gateway we're currently being given via Sonic is 192.168.42.1. Using Ookla Speedtest or Sonic's branded Speedtest our average download speeds are reliably approximately 920Megabits down. Using Sonic's, FYI, the page says the client (me) as the IP 184.23.190.182. When we connect to ovpn.sonic.net/UDP using VPN IP 184.23.190.158 those speeds consistently drop to about 220Megabits down. I'd like to figure out where the bottle neck is with Sonic's help. Obviously, Sonic maintains speeds should be roughly the same, not one quarter what's promised. And obviously, and increasingly, using a VPN is a big part of why people are going to want Sonic, and that's why they have their own privately branded SpeedTest and custom VPN available. Please let me know how I can help troubleshoot the problem, like manually point Speedtest at the Sonic server without the VPN and see what it says, as I'm sure this is an issue that lots of people are going to experience frustration with. Thanks!

Why are you using the VPN even though you're already in Sonic's network? The sole purpose of using it is if you're off net.

As the above post mentioned, you only need the Sonic VPN when you are not already using a Sonic IP address.

VPN's and Speedtests are going to conflict by nature. At home, for example, my Speedtests jump about 2x higher when I hop on my VPN - but that's not accurate of my actual speeds. You shouldn't see too much variation of speed connected through a VPN - but you may notice a slight bit of added latency since your traffic is going through the VPN before being directed regularly.

Also keep in mind, the biggest bottleneck of the VPN is encryption and decryption performed by your computer.

So most likely the decrease in speed is a CPU bottleneck from encryption and decryption. For example, a dual core Intel Q9300 is only capable of achieving about 220 Megabytes per second of throughput with AES-128-CBC. Even a higher end Core i7-4750HQ can only do roughly 688 Megabytes per second.

But as mentioned, since you're on Sonic's fiber network, the necessity of the VPN goes away for the most part. There are still valid reasons for wanting to use VPN even exclusively when on Sonic's network, but keep in mind if you're on fiber you will significantly decrease your maximum transfer speeds due to the encryption bottleneck.

Not just for the most part, it will be detrimental to use the VPN when on sonic's network in almost all cases. This is especially true on a fast connection where the encryption overhead is substantial (on both ends!)

I'm pretty sure the encryption is not multi-threaded on either the client or server so a single stream will only run as fast as the slowest CPU between the two of them. (E5-2620v2 on our end.)