As part if our December 2017 network expansion plans, a major upgrade to our transit pipe was completed Friday 8 December.
We recently announced several network expansion plans (click here) for December 2017, including transit pipe expansion. These plans are aimed at increasing network capacity for our VPN and Proxy customers, especially at peak times when ISPs (i.e. Virgin Media) are throttling VPN traffic and there is more demand on the servers.
What happened yesterday?
Firstly we need to apologise for the downtime some customers will have experienced on Friday 8 December. Our engineers were on-site at Telehouse North in London throughout the day; their work involved disconnecting and reconnecting servers and switches to install extra equipment in-line with an expanded transit pipe. The work took longer than anticipated and as things stand the transit pipe capacity has now been doubled.
Last weekend we also installed 3 extra servers at Telehouse North to cope with the increased demand. More upgrade work will follow, please read on.
Should I be seeing big speed increases?
In single one-off speed tests probably not, the gains will be minimal. Where this should help is at times when the network demand is highest, it is built to cope with double the demand and this is intended to fend off ISP speed throttling and cope with high demand at peak times.
Is the upgrade work complete?
No, our plan remains to triple our original capacity on the transit pipe, however we don’t want customers to experience downtime over the weekend so the remaining work has been postponed until next week. With the bulk of the logistics now in place we do not envisage much (if any) downtime whilst the remaining upgrades are applied.
The data centre’s do not allow installation of new equipment for a window of time during the festive season. Our plan is to add further servers in January with PPTP, L2TP and Open VPN support – watch this space!
My speeds are still poor or I have no connectivity, what should I do?
If you are a VPN Router customer please keep in mind…
Local is best and our UK VPN setting blocks nothing that UK ISPs do (i.e. Kodi, IPTV etc) so there is no need to set a foreign VPN on your router if you are physically located in the UK.
So, first and foremost please complete a full power cycle as follows:
- Power off both your ISP Router and VPN Router.
- Wait 1 minute then power up your ISP Router.
- Wait at least 2 minutes for your ISP Router to fully reboot.
- Power up the VPN Router and wait at least 2 minutes more for it to power up and connect to the VPN network.
Next, please click here for more information on alleviating speed issues with your VPN Router. We recommend (if you are based in the UK) setting your inbound gateway in the “Manage Router” section to one of or LON servers, 2 > 9 are best for VPN Router users.
If you need to create a support ticket for our staff to assist then we are open 9am to 9pm GMT and ensure a fast response at all times.
Thanks once again for your patience during this network expansion process.