Do not switch off your firewall to improve upload speeds

One of the hardest areas of tech advice is that what starts off as well meaning and sometimes sensible advice can by the time a blog is published become dangerous.

Virgin Media, at the end of February, published a blog about trying to make your work from home easier, and this has subsequently been picked up by The Mirror and we worry this could cause more problems than it solves. 

The Virgin Media item says “Check your computer or mobile security firewall settings. The software might be blocking any outgoing data and traffic.” which is odd because if your firewall is blocking any outgoing data then you would not be seeing their blog item, since even downloading a webpage involves uploading the request for the page and the many acknowledgements that resources on the page have been downloaded. What firewalls can do though sometimes is block specific ports, and if this is a company work-from-home device, you should not be fiddling with the firewall settings without talking to your IT department.

Where The Mirror goes too far in my opinion is suggesting people run a speed test with and without the firewall switched on to see if there is a dramatic difference. Odds on, if a large proportion of people do see an improvement, they will leave the firewall disabled, and that would be a big mistake. For those behind a router (i.e. vast majority) that is running NAT, you have some protection from hacking attempts but there will be people with a laptop with an embedded SIM so they are directly on the Internet and turning off your firewall could be a nightmare. Another issue with temporarily disabling a firewall is that if you have other devices on your local network that are malware infected, taking the local firewall down will let them get to your computer.

If this is a work from home situation, and speeds are slow, it is possible that the VPN to your company network is slowing you down, since the VPN will be constrained by the slowest part of the connection between your computer and where your VPN enters the wider internet. In these cases, testing your speeds with the VPN running and without it running are sensible, and then talking to your IT department to find out why things are slow if the VPN is up and running. It may be that the VPN appliance your company is using has not been upgraded to handle the larger number of work from home users or is sat on a slow part of the corporate network, i.e. there are lots of possibilities.

We wish things like firewalls, anti-virus and malware checking were not so critical, but in the modern world their functioning is critical and if you have a work laptop that is not uploading properly then randomly turning on/off parts of the operating system is not a good idea.

The Virgin Media blog is not too serious since one suggestion to speed up streaming is to reduce the quality, which while it would work, reduces the quality. What they no doubt originally said was find out how fast your connection is, and pick the streaming quality that is close but below the speeds you saw on a speed test. I.e. if you know you have a 5 Mbps service then don’t pick Ultra HD streams but rather HD streams. Good streaming services do all this for you in the background. All a bit odd as Virgin Media trades on the speed of its services and its 100 Mbps should always be good for UHD content if connecting directly to the Virgin hub via an Ethernet cable.