When you connect to VPN, and your online traffic is routed through a secure encrypted tunnel, you may experience slight changes in the
Internet speed, and this is absolutely normal. Let’s take a closer look
at what determines the Internet performance when you access the web
privately and securely instead of the regular, unprotected way.
What affects Internet speed
Distance to a server
The distance between your location and a VPN server is one of the key factors determining the Internet speed. For example, if you’re in
the UK and you’re connecting to a server in Australia, it is a
substantial distance for a data packet to travel. So the nearer a server
is located, the faster the Internet speed will be.
Unless you need to connect to a server in specific location, it is better to choose VPN servers in nearby countries, including yours. To
squeeze out the maximum, search for a high speed best VPN service
provider with broad country coverage and a large number of servers.
To see how the Internet speed differs when connected to servers in different locations, run a speed test and take a look at the ping time.
It shows how long is a delay in the connection between your device and
the server it’s communicating with.
For instance, when connecting from the UK, choose an Australian server and run a speed test, then run it once again when connected to a
server in France. Compare the ping times to see that the delay is
shorter with the French server, as it’s way closer than the Australian
one. So shorter ping times is what you should always look for.
However, to determine the actual speed, interlinking between different ISPs must be taken into account. That means that the same
speed test server must be used in both cases: when connected and when
disconnected from VPN.
Let’s say you live in the UK and you want to test the speed of your VPN when connected to a server in Germany. All you need to do is to
connect to a German server and run a speed test. However, after you
disconnect from VPN to run another speed test, you must choose the same
speed test server in Germany you used in a test before.
Server load
When there are many users connected to one server, the connection speed drops. Such overload is a typical problem with free and slow VPN
service providers that offer a poor number of servers and have many
users lured by the option of using VPN at no cost.
Quality of encryption
Encryption is the key feature of virtual private networks. It makes your online traffic inaccessible to hackers and snoopers so that you can
browse in ultimate privacy. However, the way encryption is handled
depends on a VPN service provider. It can vary in terms of quality and
reliability.
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the block cipher algorithm used as the current encryption standard. It may come in different levels
of strength, such as 128-bit, 192-bit and 256-bit encryption. The
higher the encryption level, the more reliable the protection of your
data is.
Before becoming the most frequently used algorithm in ciphering data, AES with 256-bit keys was used by the U.S. government to secure
classified information and by the NSA to protect national security data.
Even a supercomputer can’t crack 256-bit encryption, so the strongest
type of AES is what you should be looking for in a VPN service.
However, there is a small tradeoff you have to make: security and privacy supported by the strongest available encryption come with a
slight loss in the Internet speed. So it’s a matter of your preferences:
whether you need maximum speed or your sensitive data being protected
against snoopers of any kind.
Internet speed offered by ISP
If your Internet speed is low to begin with, VPN shouldn’t be the only factor to blame for your online traffic running slow.
Sometimes, Internet service providers (ISPs) throttle bandwidth on purpose. Users might experience this by their Internet speed slowing
down for specific websites or at certain times. For you as a user it
usually means that you won’t be able to stream videos or download
content as fast as you normally could. In this situation, VPN comes as a
true lifesaver – by routing your Internet traffic through a virtual
private network, you can bypass the speed limitations imposed by your
ISP.
How to test my VPN speed
Running a simple speed test will show how connecting to a VPN affects the performance and whether VPN slows Internet. To run a test
for VPN, we used the Ookla service for speed testing while connected to
Wi-Fi.
Without a VPN, using a local speed test server, the Internet speed looked like this:
Speed No VPN
When connected to a recommended server via the auto-connect functionality, which picks an optimized server according to its load and
geographical proximity, we notice a slight decrease in the download and
upload speed.
Speed Ukraine
When continuing to experiment by connecting to servers in geographically more distant countries, we get varying results depending
on a server location. Generally, it all follows this rule: the less
distant a server is, the less the Internet speed drops.
Speed Estonia
So as you can see, the server location plays one of the main roles in speed performance. In most cases, if you use VPN for simply browsing
the web, you will experience little to no drop in the Internet speed. If
you use VPN for watching video content securely, you might be
interested in ways how to make streaming faster. In this case, we
recommend connecting to special servers optimized for secure streaming.
Also, you can try out the tips how to increase VPN speeds.
In the end, VPN isn’t made for making your Internet connection faster. Instead, VPN is all about security, privacy and opening
possibilities offered by the Internet. Slight drops in speed are
absolutely normal, and it’s a very small sacrifice to make for enjoying
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