Pulse Secure VPN slow connection

[yeeearzzz]

Hi,

I thought I would turn to the BT forums to see if the bright souls that frequent here could advise me with my current problem. BT assistance have so far restarted my home router in a bid to help which, as you'll guess reading on, it hasn't.

I've been connecting to my office computer via Pulse Secure VPN untroubled since the start of the pandemic up until last Saturday (14/11/20). Since then I can always connect (contrary to other posts of read of users being unable to connect at all) to my office PC but the connection is poor for the majority of the day, 1 bar out of 4 if you use the software yourself. It is now starting to impact my role of running of the business and my fellow director who also suffers the same problem and who uses BT from his home, as everything takes 5 times longer to do. 

Having read of other tales of (connection only) woe I've updated my DNS settings to various providers, Google, Cloudflare etc, all to no avail. At the odd time during the day I may get a 2 to 4 bar connection for 20mins when my productivity sky rockets, but always fades back to the slow cumbersome connection again. 

Is there anything I can do to try to improve the connection? My IT support said it was down to my ping rate but on testing that it generally is 15-22m/s which when reading about home broadband I believe is fine. The IT support said it should be less than 10m/s but given how solid the connection has been for 6 months, I very likely will never have gotten anywhere near that ping rate. I could  understand if the ping rate drops out but it remains very consistent. Download/upload speeds at home and in the office are absolutely above what's needed to rule that out too.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

[pippincp]

Does the same happen with a wired connection?

[yeeearzzz]

Hi pippincp,

Thanks for your message.

I've tested this for two days now at various times of day and at first I thought the wired connection may help but at all intervals thereafter there is no difference between the wired connection and the wireless connection 😞 

Any suggestions as to what, if anything, I can do?

Many thanks

[pippincp]

Forward the port the VPN is using, change the connection mode. Either or both would maybe solve your problem.

[yeeearzzz]

Cheers for this.

I'll speak to my IT department as Pulse is launched via login on a webpage with a launcher program downloaded to connect. My firewall is a free version of Zonealarm, which seemingly does not have the functionality for your suggestion if it is to punch a hole in it for a port (apologies if I've the wrong end of the stick here).

If you meant something else please do share as I'll try anything!

Many thanks