Can a VPN speed up internet?

Question

VPN

When you're in an area with poor internet, does the VPN act like a permanent connection, thus cutting off the overhead of re-establishing connections? Something like VPN as a bridge to the data center, from where the entire Internet is faster.

I noticed that torrents start to work faster, but maybe this is due to the fact that the provider is not able to recognize the type of traffic and cut it down in speed.

I want to learn the mechanics of the question from people who are knowledgeable in networks.

Answer 1

In short: yes, tunneling can both improve ping and improve connection speed and stability.
Home providers still have severe traffic cost optimizations by using the cheapest channels, regardless of the number of nodes on the packet path.
For example, in 2019, I observed a ping of 80 ms between providers in the same city, and packets to St. Petersburg were completely routed through the Novosibirsk→Chelyabinsk→Samara→Moscow→Petersburg→Finland→Sweden→Germany→Petersburg chain.
A simple VPN tunnel to the data center with a high-quality Internet link, with which the provider has a direct or short connection, would improve ping and, most likely, the overall speed of the Internet.
In addition to tunnels using standard protocols, there are specialized ones that are configured to work better in certain conditions. For example, tunneling over the QUIC protocol will reduce TCP window adjustment delays on legacy operating systems with a modern proprietary algorithm, while kcptun is designed for links with significant packet loss.
In the early 2000s, using VPNs and proxies to reduce ping in games was a common practice.

Answer 2

Theoretically, a VPN should be slower than the main Internet, because it adds overhead to the channel.
But in practice there are situations when it works the other way around.
Imagine the situation, your provider gives you 100Mbit/s of national traffic and 20Mbit/s of global traffic. Accordingly, foreign sites will open more slowly. If you have a server in the Data Center that has a provider with 100 national and 100 world conditions, then by raising the VPN to this server your world traffic will run faster.

Answer 3

No, he can not. Moreover, it does just the opposite - it slows it down.
This is due to additional data transfers between VPN server and client, as well as due to the fact that it takes time to encrypt / decrypt data transmitted through VPN.
By itself, VPN works on top of an existing connection, no miracles. VPN can work at best no worse than a physical connection with the operator. But this is ideal, in reality, the speed inside the VPN is much less.
All this is relevant when you use Internet access through VPN. But this is not necessarily the case. Most often, VPN is configured to access, for example, the organization's closed resources, and you use the entire Internet as usual - directly without VPN.

Answer 4

No
Andrey Barbolin offered a good example with provider restrictions,
but I will add that Russian providers, successfully breaking the Internet in recent years, have made it noticeably slower in some situations (depending on the provider and its Internet filtering settings), so if I see that the site opens and works slowly , I open it in a nearby browser with a profile configured to use a socks proxy in Europe (vps for a couple of bucks a month) and 'everything flies'
I can't imagine how it is possible to surf the Internet in modern Russian realities without such a proxy neighbor. There are rules for proxy auto-configuration based on banlists, but their use is rather complicated.
Well, using a vpn for all traffic is a definite slowdown, both in terms of pings and traffic (vps with good internet speed are more expensive than a couple of bucks), so you have to separate them by browsers like this.

Answer 5

Torrents, in theory, can be accelerated from a VPN if you have a gray ip , and the channel is large. Personally, I have a 100 Mbps channel, but with closed ports, the speed of torrents is not higher than 20 Mbps, and with open ports, the speed is at maximum. But this is not the acceleration of the Internet itself from the provider, but overcoming the limitations. A VPN can remove one limitation, but it is also a limitation in itself. That is, it is a kind of exchange of one evil for another (in terms of speed). And this exchange is not always profitable.
Restrictions are different (narrow neck). What restrictions exactly you have - you know better. It can also be a provider that cuts torrent traffic (and in the case of a VPN, it cannot recognize the type of traffic). This may be a limitation on the router, as well as some kind of limiter at the level of system software (such as a firewall), etc.
In rare cases, when a crooked provider drives traffic along an unprofitable route (with packet loss), using a VPN, you can sort of set a shorter and more stable path, but it’s more correct to solve such problems from those. provider support.
And of course, a special place is occupied by the ILV, which, in principle, introduces instability into the operation of some programs that require clouds and all that. In this case, a VPN removes this "instability" because from the provider's point of view, you are only connecting to one server. That is, the principle of "all or nothing" begins to work. True, this practically does not apply to the speed of torrents.

Answer 6

Nothing can "speed up" the Internet. Because the concept of "Internet speed" - no. There is an exchange rate with site A, B, C, which depends on all the nodes that stand in the way from you to the final one. There is an exchange rate with a specific torrent distributor.
Providers often (especially zadripanskie, sitting on the backbone channel) cut torrents, so allegedly "acceleration" is just a bypass of restrictions, a channel to which no restrictions are applied, VPN only slows down, because encryption is in progress (eating percent and adding additional headers to packets) and authentication (requiring additional traffic).