How Fast Is Your VPN?
Measure real download speed, upload speed, ping and jitter through your VPN connection.
Test History (This Session)
| Time | VPN | Download | Upload | Ping | Jitter | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No tests run yet | ||||||
Why a VPN Slows Your Connection Down
Every VPN costs you some speed. That is not a defect - it is the unavoidable price of routing your traffic through an extra machine and encrypting it on the way. Three separate factors contribute, and knowing which one dominates tells you what to change.
- Distance: your packets travel to the VPN server before reaching their destination. A server on another continent can add 150-300 ms of latency no matter how fast your connection is, because the limit is the speed of light in fibre.
- Encryption overhead: every packet is encrypted and decrypted at both ends. On modern hardware with AES acceleration this costs little, but on older routers and low-power devices it can become the bottleneck.
- Server congestion: a popular server shared by many users can be slow regardless of your own connection or the provider’s marketing claims.
There is no single normal figure: it depends on your line, the server’s distance and its load. For scale, our lab (Kamatera, Toronto) gets about 589-608 Mbps through the 2 providers it measures, through servers in NL, and 2,796 Mbps with no tunnel to a test server nearby. Part of that gap is the tunnel and part is the longer route to the VPN server, and the lab does not separate the two - which is why the comparison worth making is your own. Compare your own VPN-off and VPN-on runs on the server you use, and try two or three nearby servers.
How to Read Your Results
Four numbers are measured. Download speed gets all the attention, but for anything interactive, ping and jitter matter more.
| Metric | What it measures | Good value |
|---|---|---|
| Download | How fast data reaches you. Determines streaming quality and download times. | 25+ Mbps for 4K video; 5 Mbps for HD |
| Upload | How fast you send data. Matters for video calls, backups and file sharing. | 10+ Mbps for smooth video calls |
| Ping | Round-trip latency. The delay before anything begins to happen. | Under 50 ms is good; under 100 ms is usable |
| Jitter | Variation in ping between samples. High jitter means an unstable connection. | Under 30 ms; under 10 ms is excellent |
Jitter is the metric that ruins calls, even when the average ping looks fine. A connection with 200 Mbps download and 80 ms of jitter will produce choppy audio and frozen video, while 20 Mbps with 5 ms of jitter will feel perfectly smooth. If your calls stutter on a fast connection, jitter is the first thing to check.
To measure the real cost of your VPN, run the test twice: set the switch above the start button to VPN off and run it disconnected, then connect to the server you normally use and run it with the switch at VPN on. The page puts the two runs side by side and works out the difference, which is your actual overhead on that server. A single connected measurement tells you very little on its own, because it cannot distinguish a slow VPN from a slow line. Both runs stay in this browser tab; nothing is sent anywhere unless you tick the share box.
How to Make Your VPN Faster
Changes worth trying:
- Switch to WireGuard. It can be faster than OpenVPN, thanks to a leaner codebase and modern ciphers. Providers ship WireGuard under their own names - NordLynx is one. ExpressVPN’s Lightway is its own protocol, not WireGuard.
- Choose a closer server. Latency is bounded by physics. Distance adds delay that no advertised capacity removes, so try a server in your own country first.
- Avoid congested servers. If your client shows a load percentage, prefer a lightly loaded server. Trying three nearby servers and keeping the fastest takes a minute.
- Use a wired connection. Wi-Fi adds latency and jitter that no VPN setting can compensate for. This matters more for calls and gaming than for downloads.
- Turn off double VPN and Tor-over-VPN. These features route traffic through two or more hops, and each hop costs speed. They are worth it only for a threat model that genuinely requires them.
- Check for throttling. If your VPN is faster than your unprotected connection for a given activity, your ISP may be throttling that traffic - a case where a VPN can make things quicker.
How This Speed Test Works
The test runs entirely in your browser and measures the connection as it exists at this moment, through whatever tunnel is currently active.
- Ping: after one untimed request to open the connection, five small requests to Cloudflare’s speed endpoint are timed. Ping is the median of the ones that were answered; fewer than three answers is no ping at all.
- Jitter: the average difference between consecutive ping samples.
- Download: one 10 MB file from the same endpoint, timed from the request to the last byte, counting the bytes that actually arrived. TCP slow-start is part of that time, so fast lines read low.
- Upload: 2 MB posted to the same endpoint, timed until it answers, counting the bytes it reports receiving.
- Nothing filled in: a measurement that does not complete is shown as not measured, with the reason, never as a number. A run without both transfers gets no rating and is not offered for sharing. One without a ping can be shared: the ping is stored as not measured, not as zero.
On fast lines a single 10 MB transfer finishes in well under a second, so the time the connection takes to get up to speed weighs on the figure. Treat high results as a floor, and rely on the VPN-off and VPN-on pair for the comparison. Full details are on our methodology page.
π§° Related VPN Tools
The tests run in your browser. Where one needs to know whose network an address is on, our server looks it up and keeps no address. Nothing is stored unless you choose to share the result.
π Read next
The longer version: what this test is looking for, and what to do with the answer.
VPN Speed Test - FAQ
How much speed a VPN should cost you, what the numbers mean, and how to get more of them back.
How much speed should I lose with a VPN?
There is no single normal figure: it depends on your line, the server’s distance and its load. For scale, our lab (Kamatera, Toronto) gets about 589-608 Mbps through the 2 providers it measures, through servers in NL, and 2,796 Mbps with no tunnel to a test server nearby. Part of that gap is the tunnel and part is the longer route to the VPN server, and the lab does not separate the two - which is why the comparison worth making is your own. Compare your own VPN-off and VPN-on runs on the server you use, and try two or three nearby servers.
Why is my VPN so slow?
Server load, distance and protocol are the usual suspects. Try three different nearby servers and switch to WireGuard before concluding your provider is slow. If every server is slow, test without the VPN to establish what your line is actually capable of.
Which VPN protocol is fastest?
WireGuard is the one to try first. Its implementation is a fraction of the size of OpenVPN’s and it uses ChaCha20-Poly1305, which performs well even on devices without AES hardware acceleration. Providers ship WireGuard under their own names - NordLynx is one. ExpressVPN’s Lightway is its own protocol, not WireGuard. IKEv2 is a reasonable second choice; OpenVPN over TCP is the one to avoid when speed matters, since it carries TCP inside TCP.
What is jitter and why does it matter?
Jitter is the variation in latency between consecutive packets. Steady 60 ms latency feels fine; latency swinging between 20 and 200 ms does not, because real-time applications must buffer for the worst case. It is the metric that determines whether video calls and gaming feel smooth, and a fast connection with high jitter will perform worse than a slower, stable one.
Can a VPN make my internet faster?
Occasionally, yes. If your ISP throttles specific traffic - streaming or peer-to-peer are the usual targets - a VPN hides the traffic type and removes the throttling, which can produce a genuine improvement. A VPN can also sometimes route around a congested peering link. Both are exceptions; a VPN adds overhead by default.
Is this test accurate on gigabit connections?
It understates them. On fast lines a single 10 MB transfer finishes in well under a second, so the time the connection takes to get up to speed weighs on the figure: treat high results as a floor. For gigabit measurement, a native speed-test client will give a truer figure; for the cost of your VPN, compare a VPN-off and a VPN-on run here.
Should I test with the VPN on or off?
Both, one after the other. A connected measurement in isolation cannot tell you whether a low number comes from the VPN or from your line. Test disconnected first to establish a baseline, then connected to the server you normally use - the switch above the start button marks each run, and the page shows the two side by side with the difference. The gap between the two is your VPN’s real cost, and it is the only number worth comparing between providers.
Why do results vary between runs?
Network conditions change constantly - server load, routing, local Wi-Fi interference and other devices on your network all shift from minute to minute. Some variation between consecutive runs is expected. Run the test three times and use the median; the session history table above is there so you can see the spread rather than trusting one sample.