How to circumvent ISP Limiting "Unknown" traffic - (SSH)Proxy, VPN

Question

I am having issues with using a proxy/VPN, with my current ISP (Comenersol, Spain). From my point of view they limit traffic by protocol or by traffic they "know" and "dont know". I'll explain my findings so far below.

• Internet connection in Spain: ~400-420KByte/sec (speedtest.net)
• OpenVPN Server in Sweden(pfsense): 100/100Mbit. LZO Compression. TCP. Tun. Aes128
• Squid Proxy server in Sweden (pfsense): 100/100 (same box as the vpn server). Plain, no encryption. Runs in stealth mode to hide the use of proxy.

NOT running OpenVPN or Squid Proxy, this is my findings:

• When I download a file from my pfsense box in Sweden, I get maximum speed
• When I run speedtest.net and choose any european server (including Swedish), I get max speed
• When I download a torrent (with non default port above 10K), I get limited to ~100KByte/sec. Encryption is turned off
• If I download something through https, I get max speed

Running either Squid Proxy or VPN, this is my findings

• When I download a file from my pfsense box in Sweden, I get ~100KByte/sec
• When I run speedtest.net and choose any european server (including Swedish and Spanish), I get ~100Kbyte/sec
• When I download a torrent, I get same limitation ~100KByte/sec
• When I download something through https, I get ~100KByte/sec

I verify the speeds above with speedtest.net measure, firefox measure in addition to having bmon running in terminal in the background. This way I am certain that the speeds I get presented, are in fact correct.

If I connect through a different ISP with VPN or Squid Proxy, I get better speeds (400KByte/sec ++)

In short: Whenever I tunnel my traffic through Sweden, my SPanish ISP throttles the traffic. I thought tunneling it through Squid would solve the issue, since I then would no longer hide my traffic through encryption. This does not seem to be the case. Wget and fetch gives same result. I did not try 'nc', but I assume this would give the same result.

Does anyone know how to circumvent this issue? I would very much like to be able to get full speed with Swedish ip, as this would make me able to stream TV at higher quality than today. 100KByte/sec just does not cut it quality wise.

Thanks for reading. Looking forward for your help.

Answer 1

The only way to change traffic from something your ISP doesn't know into something your ISP knows is to tunnel it. This requires cooperation from both ends of the connection so if you can't make that happen you are stuck.

Of course it may be that your ISP only cares about the ports that traffic is coming through, so you may try setting your torrents and/or streaming service to work over ports 80 or 443 and see what happens.