Hi all, I believe this is my first post on the Verizon forums. I have been a FiOS user since it came to my neighborhood, I was one of the first to sign up, and I have always been delighted with my service up until the last couple of days. I am one of the heaviest users, I have gotten the bandwidth warning letter twice, but I now keep my usage low enough to stay below their limit, which is said to be 10 TB a month.
Anyway, most of my traffic flows through an OpenVPN tunnel, and it has been working quite well for several years. Although I usually apply my own bandwidth limiting, I can easily max out my 75/75 connection in either direction if I turn my bandwidth limiting off. I tested out several different VPNs a while back, and noted which one would allow me to Max my connection out for a long period of time without causing any slowdown.
What has happened in the last two or three days is that my connection will very quickly go from like 35 MB/S through the VPN down to anywhere from 0 to 10 kB/S and remain there for many hours at a time, regardless of what type of application I'm trying to route through the VPN. During these time periods, my direct connection will still work happily at full speed in either direction. But the VPN is essentially shut down.
I know your first response, the problem is obviously with my VPN provider. Yes, I thought that as well. And after being down for a bout eight hours the first time, the speed very suddenly went back up to normal, just like somebody through a switch. I assume my VPN provider had a problem, and that they got it fixed. About 12 hours later the speed went back down very close to zero. I rebooted, and reconnected. No change, VPN essentially dead. I tried to more servers from the same VPN provider, located in two different countries. Same result. I next try these three servers from another computer, again same result, VPN not flowing.
At this point I was pretty sure I was dealing with some type of throttling, was not sure if it was Verizon or the VPN company. So I set up a one-month account with one of the other VPN providers which I found to be quite fast in the past. I tried several of their servers located in several different countries, pretty much the same result. The connection would start out working for about 10 or 15 seconds, then drop down to approximately dial-up speed and not go up again. I also tried this VPN provider on two different computers.
Does anybody here know why they have started doing this? Or if this is going to be a permanent "feature"? I would really like to know the future of FiOS throttling, as I am do to renew my contract in three months. My original reason for coming to Verizon was to get away from the Comcast caps. Having an important part of my functionality turned off is no better. If I know this is going to continue, I can just go back to Comcast and save a lot of money each month.