IPVanish on asuswrt-merlin speeds

[roboots21]

Folks, mostly new to the forums here. I've been reading more and more and setting up my recently purchase RT-AX88U with the likes of Skynet/Diverson/AMTM/etc. I'm running the latest alpha build right now, and started to experiment with using a VPN. I had since already had a subscription to IPVanish valid until 10/2020, so I decided to give it a shot getting things set up.

I'm pretty sure I was able to get everything up and running, but I had some minor issues. Using spdMerlin, it was unable to do any further speedtests while connected to the VPN, so I had to manually go to speedtest.net to run them.

That being said, I'm more wondering how speeds on a VPN typically compare to those of normal. I have a 100D/10U connection locally and I'll normally get about 115mbps D/ 11 mbps U when running the speed tests. When I enable the VPN using the closest server (I'm about centered between Boston/New York, so using NY Servers, 50% utilized), my speeds average about 70 mbps D / 10 mbps U. Is this a typical speed drop over most VPNs when ~200 miles from the server? I'm all about having that extra layer of encryption and such from my ISP, but I'm just wondering if that is a typical speed drop.

Thanks in advance.

 

[SheikhSheikha]

In general a VPN will consume part of your ISP capacity. A lot of variables play a role in how much in practice is consumed. (e.g. which VPN provider you use, which client protocol you use, your ISP (some of them throttle VPN traffic), which node you use, time of day, day of week, the amount of hops that your router has to take to the node etc. etc.). In no way expect VPN performance to equal to e.g. a client installation on your devices (phone, laptop, PC) as the CPU in the router has less power and capacity then those devices. Test with different nodes (server locations) of your VPN provider to identify which one is the fastest for you. Based on your ISP link (70Mbps from 100Mbps/10Mbps from 10Mbps) as you describe in your post is in my experience a fine VPN connection performance.