
“Will VPN make my internet connection faster?” It is one of the top-rated questions in leading VPN forums and blog comment sections. What is the reality of VPN or virtual private network? Can it increase the speed of an internet connection? Can it slow the connection down? This kind of confusion arises because people like to test the speed of their connection with free and popular speed testing tools after getting a new VPN. The sentiment is understandable – You want to see the results after you are paying for a new service. There are the occasional instances when you will get an accurate reading from these tests, but most of the times, the result is much higher than the actual home connection.
It is a myth that VPN boosts the speed of your existing home internet. So why do coders, web users, and corporate offices turn to this service time and again? It can speed up specific activities on the internet depending on the policies of your ISP. Traffic management policies and traffic shaping policies are prevalent among several service providers that can harm the speed. A VPN can help you tackle these restrictive policies and assume higher than average speed during peak hours. If you use torrent for downloading media files, you must have already noticed how it slows your connection down to torrent services. You could end up losing more than half of your net speed for this action. Using a VPN service can keep your ISP from restricting your speed during these activities since they would not know which sites you are visiting. They cannot impose data restrictions. The infrastructure, servers, and connections vary between the VPN providers.
When does VPN boost connection speed?
Have you ever heard about bandwidth throttling? It is when an ISP imposes a regulatory measure to minimize the bandwidth congestion and regulate network traffic during the busy hours. You may have experienced this while using the “unlimited” data packages from one or more providers. The providers reduce bandwidth traffic to limit download and upload activities. That is the reason some Vimeo videos take longer to buffer and download than the latest episodes of Stranger Things on Netflix…