Sonic.net

I've discovered something that strikes me as odd and I was curious about it.

I originally got DSL when it was first offered on Sonic ...which seems like ages ago. I remember, at the time, my speed was around 7 mbps, give or take.

Over the years, it has degraded down to just less than 4 mbps so I decided to get the X2 DSL installed. That was completed last week and I'm happy to say that my speed went up to around 11mbps which is nearly triple.

Now for the odd part.

I decided to use the OpenVPN service with Sonic. So I downloaded the software, installed it and logged on. I decided to run a speed test as I figured connecting to a VPN would degrade my speed somewhat and I wanted to see how much. Imagine my surprise when my speed went up to nearly 30 MBPS ...up to 3x my normal speed! This is wonderful but how does this happen?

Compression by the VPN is causing the speed test to be in error.

Your speed hasn't actually increased. The skewed test result is due to the compression of the VPN. While using the Sonic VPN myself at home, I don't notice any loss of speed - although there is a slight addition to latency (not even high enough of a jump to bother me when gaming).

Ahhh ...Ok, that makes sense.

And I have the opposite problem.

Ever since changing from sonic's legacy DSL to Fusion, I have had nothing but problems. Such things happen but what is curious, at least to me, is what I have found using sonic's own fusion line profiler. Seems like both the down and up sync rates meet the expected rates only over night. Beginning about 10 AM and continuing to about 6PM, rates fall by 50%. On bad days rates can fall another 50% , sometimes with an occasional 0%. Happens every day. I've seen downside sync rates as low as 1.5 Mb on a service advertised as "up to 20 Mb".

BTW, the location here is LA where sonic uses ATT's infrastructure and distance to the CO is only about 4000 ft.

It sounds like your pair(s) may be going past some source of noise. You may want to contact Support, who can look at the graphs and start some troubleshooting.