Fun networking stories: finding the “fast lane”

I went to a boarding school for part of high school. (It was actually a public boarding school—weird, huh?) We lived in an old college dorm that had four floors. I lived on the 4th floor and one particular friend lived on the 1st floor.

Our Internet connection on the 4th floor (and actually most of the building) was pretty bad. We’d usually get around 110 KB/s and sometimes during busy hours it could drop to 30 KB/s with some bad jitter.

My 1st-floor friend, though, consistently got 4 MB/s down and would be playing low-latency Urban Terror while the rest of us upstairs were cursing the school’s IT department. Rumor is that part of the first floor flooded a few years back causing a lot of the wiring and networking to be replaced.

However, a little bit of experimenting showed something promising: I could connect to my friend’s computer downstairs at high speeds, even though at the same time I would have trouble watching YouTube. So, we did what any normal high schoolers would do: we set up OpenVPN, using one of the school-issue laptops as the server downstairs in my friend’s room, and installing the OpenVPN client on my own laptop upstairs. All of a sudden, I could stream videos at 4 MB/s while my next-door neighbors were stuck at 100 KB/s or worse. The only downside was increasing my friend’s latency while he was gaming.

We never did figure out the networking topology of the building, but I doubt it’s gotten much better since.