My VPN Is Slow What Can I Do To Make It Faster
The Internet is a large and dynamic network routing data packets between billions of devices. When the computers routing this data fail certain routes become unavailable and traffic has to be temporarily routed over an alternate path causing congestion on the new route . Speed issues are therefore often temporary and will resolve themselves automatically as new routes are added, repaired and optimized.
A VPN is dependant on the speed of your connection to the Internet. Whatever the speed of the connection is, the VPN cannot be faster. In fact, you should expect a small loss in speed when connecting to any VPN service due to the software having to encrypt every packet of data. This loss should be small, usually 10-20% when compared with your connection without a VPN.
If you have a persistent speed issue consider the following troubleshooting steps.
Keep Your Router Away From Other Electronics
To get the best speeds, you want to minimize interference. This means you need to position your router away from other electronics or large metal objects whenever its possible to do so. Keep your router away from heat sources, including heaters, vents, furnaces, and stoves. This way you prevent damage to its components.
Pro-Tip: Avoid the kitchen like the plague. Not only is it generally a more humid room that can slowly damage your router, but your microwave spells disaster for your speed. Microwaves emit a strong signal in the 2.4GHz band, which is the same one your router uses to operate. For more details on router bands, check our #8 tip.
Adjust Your Encryption Level
Depending on your device, platform, and VPN, you may be able to change the type of encryption youre using. But before playing with protocols, study their differences and find out about any possible risks associated with them . For ultimate security, pick the OpenVPN and IKEv2/IPsec protocols used on the NordVPN apps.
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What Is A VPN
A commercial virtual private network is technology that allows you to create a private connection over a less private network by creating an encrypted tunnel between your computer and the internet. You can install a VPN just like you would any other app or program on your smartphone or computer. A VPN can let you get around censorship in your country or access geo-restricted media content from another country — and prevents your internet service provider from being able to intrude on your privacy by snooping on your web browsing. VPNs do this by allowing you to appear as though you’re connecting from a different location or country.
A VPN is great for anyone using public, unprotected Wi-Fi, such as what’s offered in airports, bars or coffee shops. Your VPN protects your sensitive information — from your work projects to bank account login information — from being seen by malicious actors who trawl public Wi-Fi networks. When you browse the internet while on a VPN, your computer will contact the website through your VPN’s encrypted connection. The VPN will then forward the request for you and forward the response from the website back through its secure connection.
For more beginner-focused VPN help, we’ve demystified some of the jargon in our guide to all the VPN terms you need to know.
Recommended By Our Editors
Because we make our methodologies public, it is also possible that VPN companies could tweak their networks to obtain better results. For example, a VPN company could endeavor to rent server space as close to our offices as possible, hoping that the shorter distances will yield better speed test results. There’s little we could do to prevent a company from doing this. That said, speed testing is only a small part of our reviews, and even an outstanding speed test result wouldn’t do much to raise the score of an otherwise mediocre product.
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Which Country Has The Fastest VPN
Thats a hard question to answer. It really depends on the time of day and how far you are from the nearest VPN server in your area. You probably find the best VPN servers around the major American cities as there is more demand.
The best thing is to ask your VPN provider about which location they recommend to you for the best speed. When you contact the chat support they will typically have access to a dashboard of all their web servers.
That will let them guide you toward the best possible connection.
Choose The Right VPN Server Location
VPN connection speed can depend on the location of the server. For example, South Korea has the fastest internet speeds in the world with an average of 26.7 megabytes per second compared to the global average of just 5.5 Mbps. Other VPN servers that likely offer higher speeds include Sweden , Norway , and Japan .
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Does Your Router Fit Your Coverage Needs
Different routers have different coverage areas. If yours has been with you for multiple years as you upsized and moved houses, it might not do the trick anymore. If your router fails to cover large areas, youll definitely notice a degradation in speed.
Pro-Tip: If you have a new router that still doesnt cover your entire place, consider looking into Wi-Fi extenders.
Will A VPN Be Able To Eliminate Buffering
A good VPN can help you eliminate that disturbing spinning circle if the problem is bandwidth throttling or inefficient ISP routing. Here are a few important factors we should consider when choosing a fast VPN:
- Speed- Although it seems that this will go away without saying, there are a few factors to consider. We should know what encryption protocols do a VPN use? Always read the customer reviews to see if they are satisfied with the performance. If we talk about NordVPN, its new NordLynx protocol is the critical factor behind its amazing response from its users. Their customers have made them the fastest VPN among different VPN service providers.
- Server network- The number and location of available servers can definitely affect the speed of your connection. The VPN with the most servers will be less likely to be overcrowded and slow. Its also important to consider the location: the closer you are to a VPN server, the less data has to travel from your device. Of course, a larger server network increases your chances of being close to the server youre connecting to.
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Is It Possible To Get Free Internet Through VPN
When you acquire a VPN, it guarantees to protect your anonymity online and act as a buffer to secure your sensitive data. It does this through a layered system of protection, where not one but many holes in your security are plugged to keep your safe while surfing the internet.
Firstly, your IP is protected by re-routing it through a different server in a different destination. Your IP is like your online address and if left unprotected, it can make you highly vulnerable to attacks from hackers and allow governments and copyright trolls to discern your actual location.
Secondly, your data gets encrypted and then bundled in and transported through a secure protocol. The protocol is there to ensure that no one can access your data packet. Conventionally, the top VPNs use AES 256 military grade encryption, which guarantees top safety and is virtually undecipherable.
Thirdly, the best VPNs do not keep any logs. This action is meant to protect you in case the government authorities or copyright trolls land up at the VPN providers office and demand them to hand over the location of the individual they suspect of trespassing the restrictions.
Free Internet under the cover of a VPN can now be obtained on all kinds of popular devices and OS. Most Best VPN providers now offer a legion of compatible apps to make it easier for you to download, install and run them. Here is a list of the devices and OS on which compatible apps by VPN providers are widely available:
Which Country Has The Fastest Connection
South Korea has the fastest internet speed at 26.7 Mbps, compared to the global average speed of 5.5 Mbps. To put it into perspective, with South Koreas speed, you could download an HD movie in seconds rather than hours.
Sweden ranks second at 19.5 Mbps, followed closely by Norway , Japan , and the Netherlands .
Of the top 10 countries with the fastest internet speeds, Denmark has the lowest speeds of 16.1 Mbps, while Hong Kong, Latvia, Switzerland, and Finland all have speeds between 16.6 Mbps and 16.8 Mbps.
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How Top Check Your VPN Speed
Regardless of how fast a provider claims their VPN to be, it is best to check the internet connection speed. VPN speed can be verified using the following process:
Can A VPN Make Your Internet Faster
In some cases, a VPN can actually make your internet faster. Heres how:
- It helps you evade bandwidth throttling. Sometimes your ISP will limit the speed at which certain online activities take place if you’re watching live sports during peak internet times, for example, they can slow your connection down. But they can’t do that if they don’t know what sites you’re visiting, thanks to your VPN.
- It helps with inefficient ISP routing. Your ISP won’t always route your data through the fastest channels, but with a VPN you can bypass these limitations.
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Should You Get A Free VPN
You should get a free VPN if youre on a budget and need a VPN for relatively limited purposes. But be careful when you pick one, because many free VPNs are full of ads, have slower speeds and fewer servers, and sometimes adopt questionable business practices .
VPNs that require a monthly subscription tend to be far more secure and give you a lot more options to work with. It costs more, yes, but youre paying for better performance and peace of mind.
How To Use A VPN To Speed Up Your Internet
While its common knowledge that even the best VPN will slightly slow down your maximum connection speed, few people know that one of the most ingenious VPN uses is speeding up your connection. But how can that work?
Here, were going to give you a brief guide on how to use a VPN to speed up your internet connection, in what situations that might be possible, and if its something worth you doing.
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What Affects Internet Speed
At its core, a VPN’s job is to encrypt your connection and send it through a secure VPN server. Because a VPN adds extra steps between you and the internet, its bound to slow down your connection somewhat. However, there are tips you can use to reduce the impact, and well even see cases later where a premium service like NordVPN can make your internet faster!
Do VPNs Slow Down Your Internet
To some extent, it is true that a VPN can slightly slow your internet connection VPNs add a layer of encryption that may lead to a small reduction in speed. In addition, if youre using a VPN with a limited number of servers , the servers may become overloaded. This will almost certainly lead to slower internet speeds.
If you choose to connect to a server in a country that is far away from you when using a VPN, you may also experience additional lag time when browsing the internet. This is because of the physical distance that the data packets need to travel.
Most premium VPNs are aware of these issues and take measures to reduce them, like having plenty of servers available worldwide to prevent overcrowding.
However, it is possible that using a fast VPN can actually speed up your connection, because of the practice of bandwidth throttling. Let us explain
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Easy Ways To Boost Your Internet Speed
In this article, Im going to list 10 easy ways to boost your speed, starting from simple tips and moving on to tech-savvier ones. Heres a quick overview:
Ill go into more details on each one further in the article, but before you get to tweaking, you should first establish if your internet speed is truly slow.
Cyber attacks and online threats will also grind your online speed to a halt. Protect your connection from snoopers and prevent malware-induced slow speeds with CyberGhost VPN. Our fast VPN servers will make surfing online a breeze, and our military-grade encryption will keep your connections safe from any intruders.
Summary Do VPNs Make Your Internet Faster
Overall, using a VPN has tons of benefits, but speed is generally not one of them.
A VPN makes it possible for you to protect your data and your identity when youre connected to the internet, and it increases your flexibility when it comes to circumventing geo-blocked content and circumventing local internet restrictions.
However, the added layer of encryption can slow down your internet speed.
This usually isnt a significant slowdown, however, so it likely wont be a problem for most people using a reliable, high-quality VPN like ExpressVPN, NordVPN, PIA, CyberGhost, AtlasVPN, or Surfshark.
Paradoxically, there are a few instances in which using a VPN can actually increase your internet speed. This can occur when the slowdown is caused by your internet service provider throttling your internet traffic or routing it through a slow server both instances in which a VPN would circumvent those problems.
But other than these specific instances, you can expect to see either no noticeable change or only a minor decrease in speed when using a VPN.
References:
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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has meant that the entire staff of PCMag has been working from home since March, 2020. Our homes don’t have the high-bandwidth internet connection we enjoyed in the PCMag Labs. Testing VPN speeds from our homes wouldn’t be comparable to the data from previous years and would introduce all sorts of messy variables. For example: did this VPN perform particularly badly because it’s a bad product, or was it because a spouse was on a video call at the same time?
Rather than forego VPN speed testing altogether, our solution has been to test VPNs in small batches and release the results as we go. This allows us to reduce the risk to our analysts, but still be able to conduct the same rigorous testing we have always done.
This rolling model will also lets us provide fresher speed test results and gives us a chance to more easily update the results for different products throughout the year to see if they still compete.
What VPN Is Best For Avoiding Throttling
It goes without saying that if you want to avoid network throttling youll need a fast VPN. On top of that, youll also want rock-solid security features to make sure your personal data isnt compromised, and a reliable support system to assist if you notice your connections dropping or need help setting up.
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Is Nordvpn Or Expressvpn Faster
In our recent round of testing, NordVPN claimed the top spot as fastest VPN, with its protcol NordLynx securing speeds ranging from 480Mbps up to 880Mbps. ExpressVPN doesn’t trail too far behind with its new Lightway protocol, though, reaching up to 580Mbps.
Need help deciding which to go for? Why not check out our ExpressVPN vs NordVPN comparison piece to help you choose?
Compare Your Numbers With Your Plan
Now, the moment of truth: do you have slow internet speed? Check how those numbers compare to what you should be getting from your internet service provider . Whether or not your numbers can be improved depends entirely on them and your subscription.
For example, if youre on a 15Mbps plan, you wont be able to get a faster connection, no matter how many tricks you try. Unless you upgrade your plan. The rule of thumb in the industry is that getting 70-80% of your contractual speed is acceptable.
Pro-Tip: Read the contract from your ISP. It should state what you can get from the service. No matter what you do, you wont be able to bypass data caps or reroute your ISPs infrastructure to modify your baseline speed.
For below-average speeds, contact your ISP to see if they have any technical issues in your area. Maintenance downtime or outages typically dont last longer than a day or two, after which your speed should be back to normal.
If everythings ok with your ISP, but your internet is still a slowpoke, its time to put on your detective cap and see whats going on.
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