By construction, a VPN uses encryption to secure the data transfer, and the encryption/decryption process takes time. Thus, a VPN is, theoretically speaking, slowing down the Internet connection. However, other factors may compensate for the speed loss and provide excellent overall performance.

We have performed a series of tests that show that a VPN may sometimes increase Internet speed. Let’s see the results first, and then we will find an explanation.

Factors that affects internet speed

To get access to the Internet, you need to either sign a contract with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or connect to a device that is already connected to the Internet (e.g., a free WiFi network available at the airport).

It is important to understand that when you subscribe to a cell phone plan and access the Internet on your phone or tablet, the mobile carrier also acts as an Internet Service Provider.

In both cases, the download and upload speed of your Internet connection is conditioned by the connection provider (ISP, the network administrator), but it also depends on your device capabilities.

Several factors are explained below, and they may help you better understand how the speed of your Internet connection may be affected:

1. Your Internet plan: The connection to the Internet is basically a service that may be offered in various flavors, and it depends on the size of your subscription. For example, you may get up to 100Mbps for the lite plan or up to 1000Mbps for the more expensive plan. The good news is that you may switch to the higher speed plan anytime.
2. Connection type: Also related to your ISP is the type of hardware connection (fiber, cable, wireless, satellite). There are significant differences between these technologies, and that means different speeds.
3. Network configuration: Most Internet users prefer connecting to their router with WiFi. For some devices such as mobile phones or tablets, it is the only option. However, using a LAN cable may result in much faster Internet speed.
4. Network congestion/Number of users: Everyone is online these days, and if the ISP or the network connecting to the Internet are not prepared to handle all the exchanged data, you may experience reduced speed during peak hours. For example, in the evening, many people are watching Netflix, or at the airport when many travelers connect to free WiFi networks.
5. WiFi issues: Your WiFi router may slow down your Internet connection. Make sure the router is placed as close as possible to your devices or use a wireless repeater. Some devices (microwaves, Bluetooth devices) or neighbor routers may interfere with your WiFi and result in slower speeds.
6. Apps running on your device: Do you have lots of apps running on your device? There are chances that they may decrease the performance of your Internet connection. Some of the apps may run in the background, download, or upload files. Check file-sharing apps, auto-update settings, sync, or backup options.
7. Viruses/malware: It is always a good idea to have an antivirus program installed on your device. Viruses, malware, and similar apps may use your Internet bandwidth and drain your computer’s resources.
8. Bandwidth throttling: ISPs may intentionally slow down your Internet connection to regulate network traffic or reduce bandwidth congestion. For example, ISPs may block or reduce the speed of P2P or even Youtube traffic. In this case, a VPN for torrenting, connection to an obfuscated server, or a Youtube VPN may be the solution for bypassing the restrictions and get higher speeds.
9. Government surveillance and censorship: If you are located in China or Iran, you may experience slow connections due to Internet censorship. Accessed content is filtered and monitored, resulting in lower download speed.

Does a VPN slow down your Internet connection?

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) acts as an intermediate between a device (computer, mobile phone, tablet) and the Internet. When the VPN is turned on, the data sent to the Internet is first transferred to the VPN server using an encrypted connection.

Once the data reaches the VPN server, the data is decrypted, and it is sent further to the Internet. The response received by the VPN server is then encrypted and sent back to the computer or device (VPN client) that required the data.

When a VPN is active the connection is slowed down due to two main reasons:

• Data does not travel directly to the destination. Instead, it is transferred to the VPN server and, after it is decrypted, it is forwarded to the destination.
• Encryption (and decryption) takes time. The higher the encryption (depending on the VPN protocol), the more time it takes to send and receive the data.

Thus, by connecting to a VPN, you should expect a decrease in your Internet connection speed. It is due to the functioning principle of a VPN.

Can a VPN increase Internet speed? Test results.

As explained above, VPN is theoretically slowing down your Internet connection. However, during a recent speed test study, we noticed that sometimes VPN might increase the Internet speed. Let’s take a look at the results first, and, afterward, explain how it is possible.

28.9% of the connections with VPN were faster than the connections without VPN

We have manually tested 100+ VPN connections with various VPN providers (NordVPN, Mullvad, PrivateInternetAccess, IVPN, and StrongVPN), various VPN locations, and VPN protocols (WireGuard, OpenVPN UDP, and OpenVPN TCP). The objective was to find out whether WireGuard was faster than OpenVPN. Still, we also observed that both OpenVPN and WireGuard were, sometimes, faster than the baseline, the speed of the Internet connection without VPN (check the testing methodology and observations for more details).

For about 29% of the download tests, the Internet connection speed without VPN was slower than the one with a VPN, meaning that it was lower than one of the VPN protocols tested.

That is quite an important result! It may imply that in more than 1/4 cases, a VPN connection may provide better speed than the regular Internet connection.

Additionally, we noticed that in about 7% of tests, all VPN protocols were faster than the no VPN connection. This may imply that somewhere along the line, some bandwidth throttling or filtering was in place.

43.4% speed gain for VPN connections

How much faster can a VPN connection be compared to the regular Internet connection? Surprisingly, the speed gain may be significant.

For example, for a connection to a test server located in Sydney (Australia), the regular speed was about 1Mbps without VPN and 33Mbps with a VPN. That was an extreme result, but important to show that it was possible.

On average, the VPN speed was 43.4% higher than the no VPN connection for the tests, for which it was a difference in favor of the VPN.

51% of the long-distance VPN connections were faster than the no VPN connections

During the tests, we also noticed that distance influences the speed of the connection. Not much of a surprise. However, for long-distance connections, about 50% of the VPN connections were faster than the baseline.

Firstly, we have grouped the connections on three categories:

• Short distance connections – for tests involving VPN servers located in Romania and neighboring countries (Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Moldova).
• Medium-distance connections – for VPN connections in Europe.
• Long-distance connections – for VPN tests outside Europe.

The test results show that a VPN may get you a higher speed for long-distance connections than your regular Internet connection.

Why may a VPN increase Internet speed?

We have learned that sometimes a VPN may increase Internet speed. Let’s find out why.

The speed of a connection between two devices on the Internet is affected by how data is routed (travels) from one device to the other—the faster the route, the faster the connection speed.

In the case of VPN, data from the VPN client (the device connected to the network) may be routed to the VPN server faster than the regular traffic is routed on the no VPN connection. Sometimes, VPN providers can optimize data routing to provide even higher performance.

Additionally, a VPN may bypass various restrictions (bandwidth, filters) that block certain routes or intentionally slow down data traffic.

As seen above, a VPN can be very competitive on long-distance connections. The faster route compensates for the time taken by the encryption/decryption process and results in an excellent speed.

PingPlotter is a useful tool to see how data travels between your device and the destination. And, in this particular case, it can show how data is routed with or without a VPN.

For example, to access a server or website located in Australia without a VPN, your requests and data may be routed similarly to the table below.

On the other hand, when the VPN is turned on and connected to an Australian server, the number of hops is lower, and there are chances that data travels faster.

Conclusion

To sum up, our tests confirmed that it is possible to increase the speed of the Internet connection with a VPN. However, it is not guaranteed.

Additionally, we noticed that there are about 50% chances that a VPN to increase the performance of long-distance connections, and the speed gain may be significant.

Thus, you may consider using a VPN for accessing servers or online resources located far away from your location. For example, you may use a VPN for gaming which will turn out to be really valuable for a complete and complex online experience.

What do you think? Can a VPN increase Internet speed? Let us know in the comments below.

Would you like to be notified when we update this article? Subscribe to our newsletter below! You will make a Transylvanian baby-bat happy.

One question regarding WireGuard seems to be more prominent than others: is WireGuard faster than OpenVPN? We answered it by performing more than 100 VPN tests using 5 different VPN providers.

WireGuard seems to be the future of VPN protocols due to its simplicity and performance. Several VPN providers were involved in testing and supporting the development of WireGuard during the last few years. And now, WireGuard is ready to conquer the World of VPN. But, is it faster than OpenVPN? Let’s find out!

WireGuard vs. OpenVPN speed test results [Summary]

• WireGuard was the fastest in 58.8% of the download tests.
• On average, WireGuard was 14.6% faster than OpenVPN on UDP and 56.1% faster than OpenVPN on TCP.
• The average speed loss was 19.1% for WireGuard, 20.6% for OpenVPN on UDP, and 58.1% for OpenVPN on TCP.
• There were significant differences between VPN providers regarding WireGuard performance.

Why is the speed of WireGuard important?

The VPN speed represents the speed of your Internet connection while connected to the VPN. It depends on a lot of factors (your regular Internet connection, network configuration, location of the VPN server, available bandwidth, encryption level, etc.). One of them (an important one) is the VPN protocol used for data encryption and transfer.

Thus, speed is a fundamental attribute of a VPN protocol and one of the criteria for judging its performance.

As a new VPN protocol, challenging the position of standard VPN protocols, WireGuard makes no exception: its speed comes under the spotlight, and everyone is interested in how fast WireGuard is.

Why WireGuard vs. OpenVPN?

For many years, OpenVPN has been the de-facto standard of VPN protocols. OpenVPN is open-source, offers good performance, excellent encryption, it is reliable, and, very important, has passed various independent audits.

WireGuard is the new VPN on the block, and it is seen as the next-gen VPN protocol, after years of OpenVPN domination, due to its characteristics:

• It is free and open-source.
• It has about 4,000 lines of code.
• It uses the latest and most robust encryption algorithms.
• It runs at Layer 3, and it was recently included in the Linux kernel.
• It uses less memory and CPU than other protocols.

As WireGuard challenges the OpenVPN leading position, it is inherent to compare the two VPN protocols.

As WireGuard works from within the Linux kernel, it can process data faster, eliminating latency associated with other VPN protocols (e.g., OpenVPN). But is WireGuard really faster than OpenVPN?

Testing methodology

It is important to underline that it was not a scientific approach. We have not used any automatic testing tools or scripts. We connected to various VPN servers and performed speed tests in the same manner a regular VPN user would have done.

To match the experience of a regular VPN user, we ran the speed tests on a wireless connection using two test machines (a MacBook Pro and a Windows laptop). We connected on VPN servers located all over the World at various distances from our location.

Also, we have tried to avoid answering the question: Is the WireGuard client app better than the OpenVPN app? Thus, we decided to proceed using VPN software that offer access to both protocols (provided by NordVPN, Mullvad, PrivateInternetAccess, IVPN, and StrongVPN) and have (almost) the same conditions for WireGuard and OpenVPN.

The testing process consisted of the following steps:

1. For each test, we established the baseline by testing the Internet connection with no VPN at the moment of the test. The speed test (using Speedtest.net) was performed on the Chrome browser from our current location (middle of Transylvania) to a Speedtest server sometimes located near the VPN server and sometimes located near our location.
2. Next, we tested the VPN connection using WireGuard to the Speedtest server from the previous step.
3. We switch to OpenVPN with UDP and tested the connection speed in the same conditions.
4. Further, we tested the VPN connection using OpenVPN with TCP.
5. Finally, we compared the results.

Of course, the results need to be regarded with (a little bit of) caution as:

• For certain VPN providers, we could not make sure that we were testing the same server for all protocols, even though it was the same location. This could have been given some wrong results due to hardware differences between servers, server load, server bandwidth, etc.
• A test could have taken several minutes. Meanwhile, both the speed of our Internet connection and the speed of the VPN server could have fluctuated.
• Additionally, we had not had access to Speedtest server parameters at any particular moment. And this could potentially add more uncertainty to the test results.

However, taking all this into consideration, we still consider the test and the conclusions valid.

Is Wireguard faster than OpenVPN? Test results

Many VPN users have started to switch to the WireGuard protocol due to various reports that state that WireGuard is faster than OpenVPN. Is this true?

WireGuard was the fastest in 58.8% of the download tests

Yes, on most VPN connections, no matter the location, distance, operating system, WireGuard was the fastest (for download). However, OpenVPN on UDP was unexpectedly close.

Although the download speed is seen as the main criterion for measuring the VPN speed, it is worth mentioning that OpenVPN on UDP was the clear winner for upload.

WireGuard was 14.6% faster than OpenVPN on UDP and 56.1% faster than OpenVPN on TCP

On download speed tests for which WireGuard was faster then OpenVPN we were interested in finding out how fast was it compared to OpenVPN. The difference to OpenVPN on UDP is surprisingly small, but significant compared to OpenVPN on TCP.

Speed loss – WireGuard vs. OpenVPN

An important aspect when measuring the speed of a VPN connection is the speed loss compared to the regular Internet connection. As seen below, WireGuard and OpenVPN on UDP are neck-to-neck (19.1% average for WireGuard and 20.6% for OpenVPN UDP), while OpenVPN on TCP is cleary the protocol that cuts off most of your usual Internet speed.

Differences between providers

As explained here, the implementation of the WireGuard protocol is slightly different for every VPN provider. Additionally, the OpenVPN configurations may be quite diverse. Thus, the speed of the VPN connection for each protocol varies from one VPN service to another (we have included the VPNs for which we have conducted most of tests):

Conclusions & takeaways

Is WireGuard faster than OpenVPN? We think it is: on average, WireGuard was about 14% faster than OpenVPN on UDP and 56% faster than OpenVPN on TCP, on all devices, across all the locations, on all apps we tested.

During the tests we have also noticed that:

• WireGuard was able to connect (much) faster than OpenVPN. We have not measured the connection time (maybe, we will do it for another article). However, it was noticeable.
• NordVPN, besides being a valuable VPN, proved to be the ideal testing tool for this project. The NordVPN apps are fast, stable, and very easy to use. And, as seen above, the WireGuard implementation is fantastic.
• Surprisingly, WireGuard was most of the time slower than OpenVPN UDP during the tests conducted with the VPN clients provided by PrivateInternetAccess.
• Not much to say about StrongVPN. We have performed several tests, but we found the overall experience unpleasant.

Have you compared WireGuard with OpenVPN? What were your results? Let us know in the comments below.

We will continue to update this article as we perform more tests. Would you like to be notified? Subscribe to our newsletter! It will make a Transylvanian baby-bat happy.