Thank you so much for the quick reply, I have somehow managed to totally break the installation altogether (it’s now bootlooping), so I’ll kill it recreate and try the above and report back.

Much appreciated

Nah we don’t know that either way on the available facts.

I had one outage which started on a Sunday and ran about 10-12hrs, 3 commercial VPNs were throttled down to 250Kb, but if you turned off the VPN or split tunneled full expected speed was reached (100Mb +). It wasn’t the VPN servers as disconnecting from wifi and going over 4G/5G worked normally.

The “outage” ended and hasn’t happened again. On the monday at least 2 of the commerical VPNs plus my work VPN were all working fine at the expected speeds and have been since. So we don’t know either way whether my work VPN was or was not affected as I didn’t think to test it.

Hypothesis 1 - I was sinbinned for too much torrent d/loading on sat night with a lock down against the VPN addresses that would have come up as the top couple of sources of large data requests (because obviously the tunnel IP address is what the ISP sees)

Hypothesis 2 - they trialled blocking popular 3rd party VPN services as you suggest (but 1 of the 3 is very obscure and def not main stream) and I was just one of those caught in it

Hypothesis 3 - Packet inspection captured torrenting activity and throttling was done because of that.

Clearly 3 is the worst scenario, 1 & 2 are quite probable - the govt is currently trying to create legislation to control VPN usage and as the largest(?) ISP Virgin would be an obvious candidate to do some tests on, and their service is so shite their customers are used to it getting shitty for random reasons.

Thanks for the input. I do a lot of remote work over a VPN for work (Azure one I assume as they’re an MS house, I’ve not checked), which they don’t block, but they also only blocked the always on VPNs myself and the rest of the household had in place for that 12 hour window on a Sunday. It is currently working fine for the personal VPNs. I didn’t think to test the work laptop given I’d tested 3 VPNs by that time, but I’ll try next time

Ahh. That’s bad. What exactly did they do that made it feel like a data collection scheme ?

Yeah, I hope it’s not deep packet inspection, Mullvad has dropped support for OpenVPN (wireguard only), the other two still support it, I’ll have a bit more of a dig, my network skills beyond the basics are getting rusty. Disguising it as https should just be putting it on port 443 and making sure it’s TCP only I would have thought ?

Great questions.

I’m reasonably confident the DNS requests are not going to the ISP but I wouldn’t bet parts of my anatomy on it. The router is set to call Mullvad’s DNS with quad 9 as the fallback (which is obv for unencrypted traffic and the initial call to start a VPN session), the Mullvad client definitely calls to their dns and they have tests on their website for dns and rtc leaks which they pass.

The other two have similar setups, although the minor one I might just carefully check.

There is unfortunately only 1 ISP in my area (Virgin), and I would really love to not be using them - they have an awful reputation for a very good reason. Their support team is truly atrocious, and from previous experience I’ll get an answer like

“I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?” “Yes I appreciate that, but are you throttling my VPN ?” “I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?”

Continue loop until you hang up.

Hostinger were very dear (double) compared to most of the other options at the lower/middle end (2cpu/4gb-ram/50+gb), but thanks very much for the suggestion, appreciated.

Thank you

Thank you

Thanks very much

Thanks very much, I’m going with OVH and really appreciate so many options.