I discovered, that after approximately 3GB of bandwidth on FREE ProtonVPN servers, speed drops to 0,5 mb/s or 1 mb/s.
I thought that was issue with my connection, bus that became a pattern.
For example when I tried to download Linux ISO (file 3,7 GB approximately). Speed dropped on 3 GB.
I don’t understand for now how their trottling engine works (because I thought thay throttle per VPN session, but after some tests it doesn’t seem so straightforward)
And for those who say “what I want from free”: I am not mad about throttling itself (they need to balance load for other free users), I am mad that tey are LYING that there is no artificial throttling!
I contacted support and they said “depend on server load”. But why on ALL (or at least most) servers, speed plummeted exactly after 3-4GB bandwidth?!
So I decided to make automatic test.
You can use my script (wrote by me with help of Fable 5) if you want (need at least 16 GB ram) here
3 Likes
Have you tested this on multiple ISP’s in different locations? How are you sure it it is proton doing this and not your internet uplink?
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They responded in other way when I mentioned script
Support reply
So they use dirty marketing. We are not, but we can kind of thing
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Complaining about actually free products is wild. Proton essentially donates that bandwidth to people idc what the limits are it’s free with no data collection.
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The supports explanation makes perfect sense.
Although the point that support had, could be transparently mentioned. For example, as an app toast when running Proton VPN and a person bumps into this throttling.
"Hey! Your connection is taking up a lot of bandwith. The free servers are not meant to be utilized for heavy usage. After all, we need to keep the internet freely accessible for people in restricted countries.
Thank you for your understanding!"
2 Likes
Thank you for your empirical testing results.
1 Like
