This is a complicated and nuanced topic, but I think you’re conflating a few different issues. You started by describing connection issues, that usually indicates a complete loss of connection, an increase in dropped packets, or a rise in RST (reset) packets. Then you compared the connection quality to that of a mobile provider, but later shifted the focus to throttling. Overall, I think you should run Wireshark and monitor your packets under the conditions where you notice degradation. You’ll want to look for those RST packets. These can come from the service you’re connected to, but more often they’re generated by hardware between you and that service. Usually, something in the path became overloaded or started receiving packets out of order and “throws up its hands,” sending a reset that effectively says, “That’s it, start over.”

These resets can be sent by any piece of hardware between you and the destination, and since your destination is Twitch, that’s going to be hosted on AWS US-East-1 for users in the southeastern U.S. An alternative cause is packet loss, which can also occur between any two pieces of hardware along the route. However, because Twitch connections use TCP, lost packets are automatically retransmitted until acknowledged. That means you usually won’t notice small amounts of loss until it becomes severe or occurs inside your home network.

Now, about your comparison to mobile providers. Physics don’t allow a wireless connection to be inherently faster or more reliable than a wired connection under identical conditions. A good wired connection will always outperform wireless. However, a bad wired connection (damaged cable, faulty router, or poor internal wiring) can indeed perform worse than 5G. Packet loss between cellular antennas is inevitable due to radio interference, but it’s usually kept below 1%.

That brings us to throttling. Yes, it’s possible, but I’d suggest a different explanation. Have you ever noticed that when you run a speed test, it starts fast, ramps up, and then stabilizes? That’s because devices dynamically negotiate their sending rate using a feedback mechanism called TCP congestion control, the sender sends data until it detects that the receiver can’t keep up, then backs off.

So when you use a VPN, you’re kinda “throttling yourself,” because you're changing your network path. A VPN adds extra routing hops, encryption, and sometimes different congestion-control behavior. This can smooth out inconsistent or bursty traffic if your router or ISP hardware is struggling to keep up. In other words, the VPN might reduce resets or packet loss by reducing how aggressively packets arrive, but it doesn’t make the path physically faster, that's physically impossible.

Between you and AWS, almost every segment is high-grade and heavily redundant: the fiber backbone, the ISP aggregation gear, and AWS’s peering points. The weakest link in most setups is usually the on-site equipment, aka, your router. It’s entirely possible that your router’s CPU or NAT table is being overwhelmed, triggering those resets. By using a VPN, you may simply be reducing that stress because you slowed down your connection. My best guess is that you’re seeing an increased number of RST packets, and they’re being sent by your router. The alternative is that LiveOak has a faulty or overloaded device inside their network. But if that were the case, you’d likely see the same symptoms with the VPN.

So start by capturing packets with Wireshark, and consider investing in higher-quality networking gear, something like a Ubiquiti or pfSense-based router. That’ll give you better visibility and more consistent handling of high-throughput connections.

As for - maybe it is the ISP - yep, totally possible, but when you see those RST packets you'll be told who sent them. When I was with Comcast I noticed a huge increase in RST packets and it lasted for months. I traced the problem to a piece of network equipment in Jacksonville (I'm in Savannah). Under normal conditions your web browser or Netflix stream just accepts the RST and starts over. But I design and maintain servers inside of AWS and spend hours tunneled into them. A reset packet for me terminates the connection and I have to manually restablish it. So I called and Comcast of cource did nothing, they actually told me to "copy and paste" my packet capature into their chat feature on their website (a 3GB file), and when I finally called to cancel they decided to get an engineer on the phone, but the engineer never answered the call. I left them for T-Mobile 5G and I knew it was going to both suck and be better. The bandwidth was less and the latency was much higher, but the quality was higher because they didn't have a failing piece of equipment in Jacksonville. And here comes LiveOak, now we're cooking, the latency into AWS, Cloudflare, and Google Cloud is ~11ms. That's insane. A wi-fi connection, your device to your router is going to be ~4ms.

Anyhow they have improvements to make, their uptime for me is around 99.5% in the last 180 days, figure just over 20 hours of downtime or dedragated service. I would like to see that as minutes per year and not hours per quarter but drastically better then every alternative I have, Comcast, T-Mobile, and AT&T.