Happy to hear, been using a VPN with MSFS for some time. Had the same issue
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This isn’t the first time I’ve heard about Comcast and Cox cable throttling users. I have Cox and totally believe it. I’ve had times when I get the low bandwidth warning, but just about the time I get fed up with it up goes back to normal.
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I discovered this about a year ago. I’m in Denver and Comcast was throttling MSFS pretty severely. How do I know? I called them and made a complaint (after the usual round-and-round to get to a live person). The service rep I spoke with denied that they do that but within a couple of hours, throttling seemed to be lifted. This lasted for about 3 months and then it started happening again. This time I loaded NordVPN and that solved the issue immediately. This issue becomes very clear whenever i download new content within the sim. Without the VPN, content downloads at 0.7 to 2 MB/s. With the VPN, I get expected download speeds often in excess of 100MB/s. I don’t know what Comcast’s problem is or why they’d deny the throttling (but then immedaitely, albeit temporarily, fix it). But it seems to be a real thing.
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Due to the oligopoly of service providers (at least in North America), many areas only really have 1 option for true high speed service if they even have one at all. Switching providers isn’t an option. And in the unlikely event there is more than one option available, if one sees the other getting away with certain shady practices such as throttling, they’ll do the same in order to cut costs and increase profits.
Sure, some areas may have several smaller local “resellers”, but they tend to run on the big local providers’ networks, and are subject to the same levels of service, including any throttling the big provider may have to save on their bandwidth costs.
So yeah, switching to another provider is not an option at all for the vast majority of folks in North America.
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Your inference may also be incorrect. I don’t think you state where you VPN connected to, but I assume somewhere outside your geographic region. What it may have done is connect you to the MSFS content servers in the region where you pop back out on the public Internet i.e. you are not connecting to the same servers as you were without the VPN.
It could be content throttling, but they would have to do this on an IP per IP basis as I assume the connections are over HTTPS, so unless they are doing HTTPS packet inspection then they still don’t know what your traffic is, only the IP, and service port(s).
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Not necessarily throttling per se, some providers tend to let their bandwidth become saturated before investing in more and I presume it’s much the same for CDNs and infrastructure. Of course the effects are much the same for at least a limited period.
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That’s a big part of it as well. I’ve seen that in the corporate environment. In the name of cutting costs, they’ll refuse to increase bandwidth until the infrastructure is under a constant crippling load before adding more capacity. As long as it works for most people most of the time, they consider it fine and not in need of upgrades.
Had that happen at work with our VPN before lockdown. People had been requesting more VPN access for years. Folks in charge said no that it was too costly and we didn’t need it. Then the pandemic struck and everyone had to work from home… It wasn’t pretty. They’ve added a bunch of capacity now though. But it took a massive failure to make it happen.
ISPs do this all the time as well. A new subdivision pops up in a city, connectivity requirements go up significnatly, but they jack into the trunk that was feeding already a bunch of nearby customers without adding more bandwidth to it congesting everyone’s traffic.
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I should add I had a similar VPN experience, during some of the earlier SU’s or rather before they even became SU’s. I regularly got quite slow downloads for updates, for particular files. When I used a VPN the speed issue went away. Was my ISP throttling my downloads? Almost certainly not as MSFS had only been out for a few months at that point. I was using a different download source.
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Many internet providers absolutely do what is called “deep packet inspection”.
Some providers deliberately throttle connections they detect are VPN connections. Many throttle connections to specific places or content providers.
- I have seen connections to certain download mirror sites, (or especially MSFS), start rapidly with impressive speeds - and then rapidly throttle down to 56 bis modem speeds from the 80’s, or less than 1 mbit speed.
- This happens often enough that it is necessary to carefully monitor download speeds and change download methods or use a VPN to get downloads that take less than two or three days.
Note that these are all my personal observations using providers in either Worcester Ma. (Spectrum/Charter), or Moscow Russia, (Centroset). Your mileage will absolutely vary depending on both provider and/or time of day.
- Mornings and afternoons in Worcester are considerably faster than evenings when everyone is home playing MMO’s and watching Netflix.
My own experience in Russia shows the following:
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Downloading updates to things like Raspbian or a Linux distro from a mirror in Russia like Yandex is (usually) very fast.
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Downloading the exact same things from a mirror site outside the Russian Federation, (AKA “The Great Firewall Of Russia”), the speeds drop by several orders of magnitude.
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The exact same downloads via a VPN to an endpoint in the same country as the mirror site produces download speeds that are nearly as rapid as the local mirror.
Re: MSFS downloads.
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Many downloads within Russia are abysmally slow.
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However, that is not universally true. Sometimes I get download speeds that, though not blazingly fast, are not bone-jarringly slow.
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When downloads ARE slow:
- Sometimes it doesn’t matter where I VPN to, things vacuum hugely no matter what I do and download speeds are borked no matter where I go. (Server saturation?)
- Other times the selection of endpoint matters. An endpoint in NYC may be terrible, but one in Chicago will be wonderful - or everything in North America stinks, but an endpoint in the UK will be acceptably fast.
- Sometimes it depends on the tunneling protocol.
- VyprVPN offers a special, proprietary protocol called “Chameleon” which (supposedly) hides the fact that you’re using a VPN. Since VPNs are technically illegal in Russia, sometimes it helps.
- Other times using protocols like Wireguard or Open VPN produce better speeds or a more stable connection.
- The VPN provider may matter.
- Sometimes VyprVPN is slow, or can’t maintain a connection but another VPN provider, (ExpressVPN), provides a faster, more stable connection.
- The next time I download VyprVPN may be awesome and ExpressVPN might stink.
It’s really an individual experience kind of thing.
One thing may work wonders for you, but it may not help the next guy at all. What helps the other guy may be useless for you.
It’s really a “Your mileage may vary” situation.
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Yes, I remember in the early days having to set my ethernet adapter to half duplex just to get it to finish downloading. How much of this was just congestion due to everyone wanting to a look at the sim, who knows. I don’t need to do this anymore… good job because I’d always forget to set it back and wonder why a 10mb file took 30 mins!
In other news, City Fibre (UK) (and another network operator aside from BT), have just starting laying full fibre in my area. wallet is ready
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In the UK I understand that BT one of the largest providers here do not throttle - this is from their BT’s approach to broadband traffic management
At busy times, internet providers can slow down traffic on the network. This is called ‘traffic management’ and it’s a way of making sure you get the best possible service.
We’re proud to say that our broadband packages don’t have any speed restrictions. So, if you’re on one of our packages, you don’t need to worry about us slowing you down even at peak times. We won’t slow down peer to peer file-sharing either, so share away.
If you want to know more, check out our Key Facts Indicator tables below or visit the Ofcom website >
We’ve also signed up to a voluntary code of practice which aims to make traffic management easier to understand.
Hope that’s useful for UK users who are concerned about his issue
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Im in the uk, and on average, i get 80 down and 20 up.
I also use a vpn, not had data messages like the OP but when it comes to large downloads on msfs, i inly get about 20mb rate (showing in the progress screen) i turn on VPN either normally to USA or netherlands, and it goes right upto my max limits of 80 and downloads 4x as quick, dont really notice a difference in day to day simming tho, but i am mainly in airliners so cant really comment on that all too well
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They also own EE and Plusnet, but broadband with them is cheaper… go figure. Anyway I digress, back to VPNs and throttling…
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Recently I had to wipe my PC and install everything from scratch, including MSFS, and was getting the dreaded 10-20Mbps range. I’m located in Texas, USA, ISP is Consolidated Communications, 1Gbps fiber service. Finding this thread I followed the advice about using a VPN to connect to a server in Iceland and boom! Consistent 260Mbps download speed. Definitely give it a try!
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From my perspective working as a network engineer for an ISP, the bandwidth issues are almost never on the server side. The vast majority are going to be either between the Datacenter and the user, or on the users end.
Depending on where the issue actually lies a VPN can definitely alleviate the issue.
From an insiders perspective you have a couple issues with ISP’s. Note there are almost certainly exceptions to this but from the 15 years I have working in Networking in the ISP space this is close to universal.
First no ISP has the backhaul to feed 100% of the bandwidth they are selling. There are formula’s we use to determine how much we need vs how much we sell. In many install cases we have as little as 20% of the backhaul. The theory is that at no point in time will every user be online and using 100% of their bandwidth. Different ISP’s have different policies on this, where I work the goal is that no link in our internal network ever sees usage over ~55% of capacity. Other ISP’s will gladly let those same links sit at 100%. As a note of interest around 50-60% of link capacity is where you start to see traffic queuing, which the end user will see as a latency spike. If this is the root of someone’s issue, the only fix is the ISP increasing their backhaul capacity in your area a VPN will not help.
2nd Many ISP’s have multiple upstream providers and traffic goes to whichever one the ISP’s BGP install has determined as the best path. This is a gross over simplification but BGP does not pick paths based on Link Speed, or Link utilization. BGP for the most part picks the path that crosses the least number of autonomous systems (essentially how many providers does this path cross). There are ways we can manipulate this, but it requires manual intervention, and changes to how our core installs routes to outside world. Sometimes a different path will be better for connections to a particular datacenter, even though it has a longer AS path. The Tier 2 (upstream providers) that your ISP ties into, also oversell their link capacity. A VPN may or may not help with issues here depending purely on where the problem link is. If the VPN traffic is still going to cross the same physical problem link the VPN will not help. If the VPN traffic bypasses the problem link the VPN could fix the issue.
These issues tend to be what leads into an ISP making a decision to throttle, or otherwise manage bandwidth. Every ISP has their own internal policies on this. Increasing capacity is very expensive, throttling and other bandwidth management techniques such as giving certain traffic higher or lower priority are far cheaper. If you live someplace, like large parts of the US, where there is only one provider there is almost no incentive to fix this. There can be a desire to wait until the current equipment is EOL (end of life) to perform any upgrades. VPN may or may not help with a situation where throttling is occurring. If the ISP is throttling all traffic to MS servers a VPN can help. If an ISP is throttling your connection specifically a VPN will not help. The last situation is not as common but I have seen it done, I have actually seen a contract for service with an ISP that stipulated that if your bandwidth consumption exceeded 75% of your subscribed bandwidth for more than 1 hour during peak usage times they would throttle you 20% of your subscribed bandwidth during peak times for a week.
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Also, if an ISP is implementing a QoS policy to limit bandwidth, VPN traffic is not immune as QoS policies can be based on the layer3/4 connections or, a percentage of the bandwidth. If your using VPN from whatever service that provides it, it just takes your data packet along with your source and the destination IP’s, encapsulates and encrypts that packet into a VPN packet with new IP’s (via software), which are the tunnel end-points on your PC and the VPN providers tunnel end point, which secures your data so that no one can monitor what your data is. Once that packet leaves the VPN providers tunnel, they simply put your packet out there on the internet to go wherever it needs to go. So with that, your ISP may not be throttling traffic, but a backbone provider may be.
As I mentioned earlier in this post, when I connect to MSFS, I have 22 IP connections to 13 servers. If I traceroute to them, I can see the path that they take along with the response times of each hop. If I were to use VPN, I would trace to the tunnel end point (while VPN is off) and I’d most likely see a different path, possibly bypassing the backbone provider that had high response times/congestion. Most streaming services like Netflix, HULU, Sirius etc, use UDP packets to stream their data, and when we setup QoS policies, it was based on UDP and IP or, a percentage of the BW. Networks are designed to take the quickest path possible. Sounds like there was a bad hop that your VPN bypasses.
A happily Retired Network Engineer of 42years. (trying to forget this stuff)
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