Need advice, possibly hacking, to improve extremely low connection

Hi
I know you will need some info as to what I have in order to help me, and I will give you all of it once you tell me exactly what it is you need.
Here's my problem. I'm newly arrived in that Asian country where most of things are now made (Ch---).
I'm in an apartment bldg. and some of us get decent speeds and I definitely don't. TO the point I can not even Skype and many pages load, and load and load and then time out. And yes I am using a VPN. Doing Internet speed tests I am getting an average of 2.7Mbps download and 0.31 up.
It should go to 15 in theory.
In doing about 50 tests i managed only once to get to 7.19 once, 9.4 once 10.6 once. all other times averaged 2.7. Using the VPN only one 'country' gave me the above results. All others were so slow that it made the old 56.6 modem seem fast. three actually hovered at 0.12, not even 1/10 of 1.Mbps

Besides actually going outside and cutting wires I am in the position of trying anything. My employer has given me permission to try just about anything.
The specs I can give you now are these:
1 laptop running windows 10 and one 9-year old lenovo pc running windows xp
the modem is a "Mercury ADSL 2/2+ , MD880D'' see attached photos.

And the speed when you are outside the VPN?

Sorry paul1149, is was sure i had answered. I guess my very slow speed is showing since a reply made never got published.
in answer to your question, it's about the same. all depends where I'm going. if yahoo slower, if other site a little faster and of course without a VPN some sites wont load at all due to the country's restrictions.
(On a side note, what I have learned in being here is that even though one is not going to google in any direct way, there is google happening in the background, not at times but quite often--and i am not referring to 'google analytics, which seems to be everywhere.)

Ok. I asked because VPNs vary a whole lot as to speed.

The first thing I would test is the DNS service. Does the VPN provide DNS services when you use it? (I would think so.) If you know the DNS service you can open a terminal and Ping it for speed ("Ping blahblah.com"). You can also try speccing your own DNS provider, either on your computer or in your router, if you have access to it. I use OpenDNS, whose working IPs are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

Not sure what you mean about google happening in the background. That doesn't sound right.

"Does the VPN provide DNS services when you use it?"
I'll have to find out, the window that pops up (and stays on unless minimized) has nothing on it except connection or changing city.

"If you know the DNS service you can open a terminal and Ping it for speed:
The internet speed test websites I use show the ping. Yesterday A.M. it averaged 72, last night 243

"You can also try speccing your own DNS provider...."
I don't know what ''speccing'' is I will look it up.

Besides this, if I may, the VPN is not the main cause, it is everything else, the hardware (wiring, modem, etc.) and software provided to run such things that are the main problem. This I am sure of.

"Not sure what you mean about google happening in the background."
If you use "TrueScript", "Ghostery'' or similar plugins you will note how many things have google this or google that working on your page. But besides this, if you have your browser show at the bottom of it the path you are taking when you link and heading to load a new page, you will see that Google often shows up. For example, when I signed in here at the very bottom I could see ''www.google.com......... ''[could not read the full path]. And having disabled TrueScript'' I can not tell you what that would show but Ghostery shows that "Google Anaytics'' is working in the background. This is what I meant.

Layback Bear regarding ''gvnmt controls' There is no intention of me doing anything illegal in any way shape or form. We know, and so does the country, that speeds here are currently low compared to about 50 other countries. And we also know about the limits purposely imposed. All other in my apartment building. The thing is I should be getting 10Mbps to 15, in theory but is in practice 5 to 9. I'm getting 1.7 or as last night ( 0.27 ) so something is wrong here. In my building some have good speeds and other no so good but none are as bad as me hence something could be done.

Do you run your own router? Maybe it needs an update. Are you on wireless or wire?

paul1149 I was hoping that given the description, my situation and photos that your question was answered. My apologies for thinking so and thank you for letting me be aware of this. No, I do not run my own anything but there are things which I had hoped I could do and then there are things which I cold let the employer do, if I know what needs to be done (this way I present myself with knowledge and not ignorance).
Layback Bear About, "Need advice possibly hacking''. You are right I could see how this could be misinterpreted but in my view there is good and legal hacking and bad one. And then with such headlines as "Cooking egg hacks'' referring to food one could also assume that 'hacking'' is now understood as a word which has much more to do then illegal things.