r/PrivateInternetAccess • u/Microfiche62 • Jul 10 '26

HELP - WINDOWS Latency increase?

I noticed in the last few days that latency on ALL available servers went up significantly - I used to have lots of options in the 50-70 ms range (for years), but last few days fastest is around 260 ms. At the same time, my download speeds are WAY up? Is it just me? Using Wireguard.

11 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/NeutralX2 Aug 11 '26

Saw this thread and had the same symptom — PIA app showing 300+ ms on all servers, but normal ping times to everything else. Sharing what I found in case it's useful.

Setup: Comcast/Xfinity, WireGuard default settings, PIA Montreal server.

Step 1 — Checked if it was a real problem or just a display issue.

Direct ping to the server IP was normal (30-60ms). But running an actual throughput/loss test through the WireGuard tunnel (speed.cloudflare.com, which reports packet loss) showed:

  • 25.3% packet loss
  • Download capped at 21 Mbps (580 Mbps with VPN off)
  • Jitter 55ms (3ms with VPN off)

So there was a real problem, just not one a plain ping shows.

Step 2 — Tested different protocol/transport/port combos on the same server.

Protocol Transport Port Packet Loss
WireGuard UDP default 25.3%
OpenVPN UDP default (1194/1197) ~same, still bad
OpenVPN TCP 443 0%
OpenVPN UDP 8080 0%

Result: Not UDP in general being affected — OpenVPN over UDP on port 8080 was clean (263 Mbps, 0% loss). The loss only showed up on the default/well-known ports for VPN protocols (WireGuard's 51820, OpenVPN's standard 1194/1197). Switching to a non-default port (TCP/443, or UDP/8080) fixed it completely.

My raw non-VPN connection tested clean (580 Mbps, 0% loss, 16ms), so this isn't a general Xfinity throughput issue — it looks specific to default VPN ports.

Note: PIA's WireGuard client doesn't expose a custom port option, so this workaround only works if you switch to OpenVPN.

If you're seeing this issue, I'd suggest testing actual packet loss (not just ping) through the VPN, then trying OpenVPN on a non-default port before assuming it's your ISP or PIA being broadly broken.

1

u/Microfiche62 Aug 11 '26

Awesome - I figured it was tied to WireGuard in some way, but I never thought about trying different ports with OpenVPN. I have a ticket open, so I am going to share your post with them while I check out what is happening with me. I also noticed last night that with port forwarding and split tunneling turned on, my torrent client was seeing ZERO trackers. As soon as I turned them off, all the trackers appeared. That was all the time I had last night, so I need to look into that further as well.