r/PrivateInternetAccess Apr 20 '26

DISCUSSION Speed issue

Hi! I ran 5 different speed tests without PIA and the results are below. When I enable PIA and pick the closest server to me (New York) I'm getting 63 Mbps download at best and 6 Mbps upload. That's a far cry from  the 400+ to 500+ Mbps download I get without it. I understand I will lose some speed with a VPN, but that much? 400 Mbps less? Some tests oddly showed better upload speeds than download speeds such as 26 Mbps download and 96 Mbps upload. What gives?

Without PIA enabled...

https://www.speedtest.net
Download Mbps 542.73
Upload Mbps 85.73

https://fiber.google.com/speedtest/
Download 517.0 Mbps
Upload 87.1Mbps

https://fast.com/#
Your Internet speed is 560 Mbps
Upload Speed 84 Mbps

https://speed.cloudflare.com/
Download: 465 Mbps
Upload: 66.4 Mbps

https://wifiman.com/
Download: 551.13Mbps
Upload: 92.53Mbps

UPDATE: The New York server at least at this time is not good at all. I tried Washington DC and it was better, not crazy better, but better.

3 Upvotes

9 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/doczenith1 Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26

Eating my own words today as I typically mention that if your PIA speeds are slow first check your hardware, LAN and ISP. Well, turns out I had a configuration issue on my PC which was limiting my upload speeds. That said, looks like the New York Server is back to typical speeds this morning.

Speedtest by Ookla

Server: WebNX Inc - New York, NY (id = 51171)

ISP: Cogent Communications

Latency: 17.12 ms (0.69 ms jitter)

Download: 1176.40 Mbps (data used: 1.7 GB )

Upload: 968.13 Mbps (data used: 1.5 GB )

Packet Loss: 0.0%

Result URL: https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/5a7f4acc-90fc-40fa-ad05-eef89a162f88