Hey, I'm just a brand new person using a VPN. Any questions?
Hey, I'm just a brand new person using a VPN. Any questions?
I'm trying to get a VPN and I have some questions that could be helpful. Setup: I am based in Canada, Shaw is my internet company, they give me a modem/router in Bridge Mode and I use Google Wifi. Devices: My computers (PC), Macbook, iPhones and iPads. Is it possible with this hardware to use a VPN? Can you program either the Shaw modem or the Google router to put all of my network under the VPN at all times? If not, do I need to install the app for the VPN on every device and turn it on each time I want to use one piece of equipment? How much does a VPN slow down my network speed? I may have more questions but I will wait to hear back about these ones. Thanks in advance for any help
It depends mostly on your computer or phone, so it can be quite heavy. Turning things off and on uses up lots of power because the process is really hard for the CPU to handle. Most routers are not very strong at processing this stuff. So what good does a VPN actually do you think?
Thanks for getting back to me. I might or might not download some torrents, even though my internet provider doesn't like them much. The best case is that they are just for specific devices, but if the torrenting causes a big slowdown on my network, then I need to make a choice.
Most VPNs will slow down your speed a lot. On most routers, you only get maybe 20-30mbps when using openvpn, and a bit more with wireguard. Even if some traffic goes through the VPN and other stuff bypasses it, you still need a special feature in the software called split tunnel to make that work. While many clients have gotten much better at this, I don't know which ones actually can do it right now or not. I know merlin firmware works on many asus routers, but you will still hit that 20-30mbps limit for VPN traffic. Other stuff won't be limited by the VPN unless you use split tunneling though. BUT there is another problem. Routers get fast speeds when they let a special hardware feature do NAT instead of using your CPU chip. As soon as you force the CPU to see your traffic, that feature must go away. You will probably cap your total data rate at about 250-300mbps because of this. So I guess it depends on how fast your internet connection is. You could try using multiple routers and connecting the device either to the vpn router or to the main internet router, but that's only slightly easier than just using vpn directly on the end device.
So maybe I should check if paying for a VPN lets me use it on more than one thing at once. Can I set up the app to start it only when I need to, instead of always turning it on?