Are you using a VPN and wondering why your internet connection feels slower than it used to? I wondered the same thing, so I set out to measure just how much a VPN affected my internet speed at home.
The results somewhat surprised me, though it made sense once I thought through it all. So, does a VPN slow down your internet connection? Yes. But, how much it slows down depends on a wide range of factors.
A VPN only goes as fast as your connection
I’ve seen some people mention using a VPN to browse the internet faster if they’re on a slow connection. While this might sound good in theory, in practice, it’s just not true. If you’re on a 100Mb/s connection, and VPN through a network with a 500Mb/s connection, you will only be able to browse the internet or download at 100Mb/s.
The only exception to this is the rate limiting that happens by your ISP or mobile provider. Depending on what internet provider you have, you might experience throttling when consuming certain media. Using a VPN can sometimes get around throttling and allow you to watch Netflix, YouTube, or other streaming media platforms without throttling.
Outside of bypassing artificial speed restrictions, a VPN is only as fast as your actual internet connection.
Using a VPN adds lots of steps to your internet browsing
While a VPN might not speed up your internet connection, it most certainly will slow it down in many instances. When using a VPN , a lot of steps are added to your internet browsing. Normally, when you visit a website, your computer gets routed to the closest server hosting that website (if the provider is using a CDN , or content delivery network). Many major platforms use CDN to speed up their website regionally.
Whenever you use a VPN, you don’t go straight from your computer to the closest server with the website on it. Instead, your request is typically encrypted first (and then decrypted when it gets to the end), and you are routed through wherever the VPN is (be it in the same country as you, or another country).
Sometimes, this can result in a pretty degraded experience. Let’s say you live in Atalanta, Georgia, and the website you’re trying to access is hosted in a data center that is also in Atlanta, Georgia. Without a VPN, you can hit that website pretty quickly. However, if you use a VPN that routes your traffic through, say, Europe, and the website only lives in a data center in Atlanta, then here’s what your browsing traffic will look like.
You make the request in Atlanta, the request is encrypted and sent through a server in Europe. Once it reaches the VPN server in Europe, the request is decrypted and sent to the website’s server back in Atlanta. The information you requested (like the home page), is then sent back to the VPN server in Europe, which is then sent back to your computer.
All of this takes quite a bit more time than it would normally if you were to just browse the website from your home network without a VPN.
Now, there’s a chance that whatever website you’re accessing has a CDN server near where your VPN server is. In this instance, the data travels from you to the VPN server encrypted, then decrypts and hits the CDN server, and immediately travels back. This takes far less time than traveling from Atlanta, to Europe, then Atlanta, then Europe, and then back to Atlanta—but it still does add extra latency and time.
VPNs are inherently slower
All the extra steps that using a VPN introduces can definitely slow down your internet browsing. Sometimes it’s not too noticeable, and sometimes it’s obvious. The simplest way to show this is with a speed test. I did a no VPN speed test , then did another speed test but set my VPN location to Atlanta, GA, USA , and then set my location to Toronto, Canada .
As you can see, my no VPN speed test was pretty fast—nearly 1,000Mb/s download, and almost 1,100Mb/s upload. Connecting to Atlanta slowed things down, but it was definitely still usable with almost 200Mb/s download and 360Mb/s upload. The connection to Canada? Well, it was pretty terrible, with a download speed of 32Mb/s and upload speed of 27Mb/s.
Another major difference in all three speed tests is the ping. Your ping is another networking metric in how fast your internet connection is. A faster ping means that you are getting a faster response from the server, which makes the webpage show up faster.
Looking at my three speed test results, the no VPN ping is 4ms, while the Atlanta ping is 17ms, and the Toronto ping is 43ms. That ping would grow drastically if I was to VPN through Europe or Africa.
At the end of the day, a VPN is most likely going to slow down your networking speed. However, how much it slows down depends on your network plan. For me, I saw a drop of 96% in speed when connecting through Toronto, and about a 80% drop in speed when connecting through Atlanta. That’s mostly because I’m on a gigabit plan, though.
If I was only on a 300Mb/s plan, then I would have seen a much lower drop in speed connecting through Atlanta or Toronto. I have a friend in Arizona with a 40Mb/s connection—he would have seen no major drop in speed through Atlanta, and only a slight drop in speed through Toronto.
Even if your internet speed stays the same, though, the ping and response time degradation you get from a VPN will still make your network browsing feel sluggish.
If you want the fastest browsing experience possible, simply don’t use a VPN. If you need to use a VPN, be prepared for at least some drop in speed or latency.
