Always use a VPN. It costs less a month than one cup of coffee purchased. Thankfully in Canada, the owners of the streams can’t touch us. The most they can do is send a letter to our ISP, they forward it to us but never reveal who we are. In fact, they say, our recommendation is to just ignore this but if you choose to reply, it’s out of our hands. Gotta love the CRTC in Canada when we are not hating it for prempting Superbowl commericials.
I have an Onn 4k Pro 2026 and every time I turn on Surfshark VPN it chokes my download speed from about 260Mbps to 33Mbps. I have read other threads here that say to take the VPN protocol off Auto and manually select Wireguard. That didn’t work. The ethernet port is limited to 100meg so I switched to Wifi as suggested and that increased the overall speed dramatically but as soon as I turn on Surfshark it chokes off the speed again. I have tried different servers to no avail. I really don’t know what to do here. Right now I am not a Surfshark fan. Funny thing is my PC was having the same issue and when I switched off the Auto Protocol on Surfshark and set it to Wireguard the speed was where it should be but not on the Onn box.
Try setting tips in this guide shown after installing the vpn
Thanks but I tried all that and it is still slow until I turn off Surfshark. Have read a lot of reviews with people claiming the same problem. Looks like a Surfshark issue.
I don’t believe it is a SS issue. I have SS and my ISP provided speed is 150 down and With SS active I get 145. But the reason for that is a more expensive device with far better tech. IMHO that is the main reason for poor performance with an active VPN.
@hy_tek …I have and original Onn 4k Pro…it can be hard to pinpoint what is slowing you down, but i had SS at one point, and 2 things i noticed, 1) the servers that SS picked as the fastest, and 2) the closer servers to my location that I picked, were rarely the faster ones, i am East Coast US, and i had way faster speeds with servers in other countries, Japan for example, would repeatedly blow away US servers…go figure right? !! even the Virtual Servers that everyone trashed, once again, great speeds for me…but good luck…
All VPNs will reduce speed on these streaming boxes due to less powerful chip. I cover all of that in the following video. But, you shouldn’t be seeing that big of a drop.
Try connecting to other servers near your physical location and see if that helps.
Finally, even with 33 Mbps you should still be able to stream both 1080p and 4K content just fine. Are you having a problem with playback or just want the extra speed? I always compare this to buying a car that can go 160 Mph but never needing that speed…same with a streaming box unless you are downloading files.
I have watched your video and the ones on SS about fixing slow speed and they were no help. I’ve tried changing servers etc. I have been on the chat line with SS tech support for like 5 hours and they have tried everything. No help. Are my speeds adequate for streaming? Maybe for 1080P but getting about 1/10 of my internet speed with SS on is unacceptable to me. What it means is I have to wait longer for movies to start and buffering and 4k movies are pretty much out of the question on my Nuvio. I have a 300Meg capped connection. With SS off I get 275 meg give or take. With SS on I get around 30-40 meg. So either the Onn 4k Pro 2026 hardware can’t handle SS or SS has some problems. I had the same speed problem on my PC and changed the SS protocol from Auto to Wireguard manually and it fixed it after doing some reading of posts here. I’m about ready to try a different VPN and see if SS is the issue.
You may have a point about the hardware limitations of the Onn. My PC is high end and SS works as it should with good speed. My Onn 4K Pro is another story and not so high end. The speed on the Onn with or without SS using ethernet was abysmal. Switching to WiFi made a big difference without SS. With SS it was the same old choke point. Could be an Onn issue rather than an SS issue.
One thing I always state in my rankings is the following. There are hundreds of different network configs/ISP configs, etc. and using a different VPN can help that. It’s impossible for us to troubleshoot things like this unfortunately.
I just tested my speed on Onn 4K Pro through my Starlink Internet connection which maxes out at 250-300 Mbps and I’m currently getting 100 Mbps with Surfshark activated so yours is definitely too big of a drop and something not right.
We always try to drive home the fact that some VPNs work better than others depending on outside factors such as Internet service provider, network, equipment, etc. Also, everyone has different use cases for a VPN service. One size definitely doesn’t fit all when it comes to choosing the right VPN!
One last thought. I don’t know how many apps and available storage you have available on this device but you might want to uninstall all apps that you don’t need and make sure you aren’t close to maxing out storage. If something is sucking CPU power from an app in the background that might be a problem. The CPU is the main speed factor on these streaming devices and it it can’t dedicate more power to CPU you will have slow speeds.
Finally, a factory reset may help as well but you will need to start over from scratch and reinstall everything.
Thanks for trying to help Troy. Memory is fine. Only apps are the ones installed from your Nuvio masterclass vid. Not looking forward to resetting the box. This is all so frustrating. I may try the free Proton vpn app just to compare. Would like some input from other Onn 4k pro owners who use SS to see if they have the same issue. Hopefully it’s not an ISP issue with vpns.
I would suggest trying IPVanish is you haven’t already as they have a 30-day money-back guarantee so if you have problems with that one too, ask for a refund. The reason I say this is because they have a working kill switch on Android TV/Fire TV devices whereas Proton doesn’t.
My ONN 4K pro typically brings in 45-50bps with SS on. Whereas my Shield Pro and my Ugoos AM9 rock out at 150bpm+. These speeds are based on the use of Analiti. I do know that some say that Analiti is not the best speed checker, but I’ve found that the results are very consistent. (note: I do find that all speeds drop, a bit. on weekends and holidays.)
What speed check app are you using?
Please report back if you try another VPN. I’m in the same situation and I have a powerful box now with 32GB of RAM and tons of storage. You said Surfshark VPN chokes your download speed from about 260Mbps to 33Mbps. With Wi-Fi, I’m probably pulling around 400Mbps and SS chokes it down to about 50Mbps. 50 is certainly enough most of the time so I don’t complain, plus I know how changing your SS location can help a lot. But it does prevent me from streaming in 4K if the file is much bigger than 5-6GB. Anything higher than that and it’s buffer city, so I try to stay within that range when choosing a 4K stream. I’ve never used anything else so I am very interested to hear if IP Vanish or any other VPN dramatically changed things for you. I’m probably overdue myself with trying something else but SS is so cheap and mostly works fine, although I HATE that their recent update took away the tiny traffic usage scales for each location. Now you have to choose a location and guess it will be a good one. I just don’t understand why it made sense to do that. Isn’t traffic usage a huge factor in deciding which location to choose?!
I also am using Analiti but tried some others and the results are about the same.
I tried Proton VPN on my Onn 4k Pro V2 and the results were about the same as with SS. My experience with SS choking off the download speed is comparable to yours. I am of the opinion now that it is more a limitation of the Onn box hardware than a SS issue. Perhaps that is why they limited the Ethernet connection to 100 meg because the unit hardware could not handle anything faster so they just tried to keep costs down. Like Troy said you don’t need Lamborghini speed when a Prius will do. I am on wifi now which sped things up. Just like you my SS speeds are around 50meg now so it’s not the fastest but it works for streaming 4k so I am going to just move on. Last night I watched a movie in 4k with no buffering so I was happy. Thanks all for the comments and trying to help. Once again thanks to Troy for all he does here. On a different note I love Nuvio much better than Stremio. Stremio never worked right and Nuvio works right out of the gate.
I don’t think your issues are because of any limitations with the ONN box. I do not use a VPN or Ethernet I use Wifi. I pay for 300 MB with AT&T Fiber and consistently get about 380 MB on Analiti on my ONN 4K Pro. Zero buffering or any issues with 4K streams.