Ask HN: Slow download to company's website, except on VPN

[boxysean]

I recently signed up for Internet service with Magenta (formerly T-Mobile) in Vienna, Austria. It's a basic 40 down / 10 up home service, and generally works well and as-advertised.

EXCEPT!

I am also starting a new job at a company that serves a web app hosted in AWS (us-east-1). After cutting over to Magenta, my web calls to static files and API calls to this web app are taking a very long time. For example, it takes between 2-5 minutes to download a 6 MB file. I am the only one at my company who is experiencing this, and no customers are reporting any issues!

This evening, I tried downloading the same 6 MB file while connected to an Austrian VPN offered by NordVPN, and the download took 2 seconds!

Any thoughts about what might be happening to me, or suggestions on what to try to debug/isolate the issue? Thanks!

[tiernano]

Sounds like a peering issue between your isp and aws... Unless other customers and employees are using the same isp... Then it might be your network or machine... Many possibilities

[boxysean]

Thanks! I eliminated that it was my machine -- I observed the same phenomenon on two machines.

I launched my own EC2 web instance in us-east-1 and hosted one of the slow files, and repeatedly downloaded it using a `python -m SimpleHTTPServer`. I similarly observed a slow download speed (128Kbps) without my NordVPN connection.

Oddly enough, I also observed a slow download speed to my us-east-1 server WITH my NordVPN connection, so that let me to believe it's a broader issue, however I did observe a fast download speed from an AWS server located in eu-central-1.

I'm generally confused. Connecting to NordVPN eliminates my issue, but the tests I am conducting are providing inconclusive evidence as to why this is the case!