VPN traffic

I need to change my ADSL provider due to my growing bandwidth usage since my wife has started working at home.

I have just email plus.net and received a very prompt reply.

I asked the following question.

My wife needs the ability to VPN into work, is there any restrictions placed upon VPN traffic during the hours I have mentioned above? (The hours in question were 0900 - 1800)

The reply I got was the following:

No restrictions as long as the VPN is on the standard port, if you use a different port we may have to check to make sure it is not shared with another product which may impact the speed of the VPN connection.

When looking at the following link http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/traffic_prioritisation.shtml

VPN traffic is prioritised as "Gold"

So my question is is VPN traffic unrestricted as per the response from the member of staff or is it actually managed/prioritised.

Hi there,

If you're using a standard peice of VPN software then you won't encounter any problems using our services.

The only restrictions that would be applied would be if you were to use our �9.99 product, which would see VPN traffic rate limited to 128Kbps.

I am confused.

You and your colleague say no restrictions yet your website cleary shows that VPN traffic is managed / prioritised.

As for software it is a Cisco VPN client.

Not a technical response, but I use VPN quite frequently from home, and don't usually have any problems. If it is shaped/throttled in any way, it's seemingly not in a way that causes me any problems.

Sorry, I'll try again

The traffic is prioritised, but with prioritisation in gold, this should not present you with any speed issues.

Right then so there are actual restrictions placed upon VPN traffic all be it at a higher level than other traffic?

I think every provider, at some times, will have positions where their network is 'full' (unless they sell you 1:1 contended product that always has reserved bandwidth just for you). In that sort of situation you will have restrictions of some sort, whether they are imposed by random natural contention or using a more organised method.

What we are saying is that we don't rate limit VPN traffic ever (except on our �9.99 Option 1 product), and it always gets priority on the network above less real time traffic like file downloads. That means, unless our network is very busy (which does occur from time to time, but generally in the evening), there won't be any actual restrictions applied to your VPN traffic.

The advantage of having this control is that we can design clever products that work well for our customers. The disadvantage of being open about that is that it can be confusing or look like we are trying to pull the wool over people's eyes. Some of the mistakes we made in the past haven't helped with that perception.

Does that help any?

Ian

The fog is lifting so to speak!!

So to summarise the VPN traffic will run at the maximum speed attainable by "your" ADSL connection speed but it's priority will be higher or lower than other traffic?

Another question if I may, how do your business products differ from the residential offerings you have?

The prioritisation can be a positive or negative thing.

Many ISPs won't prioritise traffic so everything fights for it's share and so "important" data will be fighting with "unimportant" data.

The VPN traffic being in the gold queue means that if there is a problem with too much data the VPN traffic will get the higher priority over the other less important traffic and therefore should always see higher speeds than if there was no prioritisation at all.

So, in this case the fact that VPN is in the gold queue is a positive thing. You only need to worry if the traffic you consider important was in the bronze or silver queue as then it could lose out to higher priority traffic.

Is that clear as mud?

But it doesn't have has high a priority as Titanium or Platinum traffic.