In such a scenario, the route your traffic takes from your PC to the VPN server in the US is a lot longer than the route from the VPN server to the speed test server. Then you run an online speed test and get the results. Let’s say you live in Europe, and you connect to a VPN server in the USA. These three factors alone can influence the speed test results more than the quality of the VPN. By eliminating the user’s ISP from the test, we exclude the following factors:
Let’s discuss each of these variables in a bit more detail. In short, our speed test is better because it removes more variables from the equation than your regular speed reading.
Hopefully, this gives you an idea about the relevance of most VPN download and upload numbers that you encounter online. This also means speeds will vary depending on whether you’re running a speed test or trying to stream something, for example. This means that connecting to a VPN server in the United Kingdom and downloading a file from a major UK website will result in different speeds than streaming Netflix from the United States. The internet is a network of interconnected devices constructed of various protocols. A sudden VPN server usage spike or somebody starting to download a large file on your wifi can make an industry-leading VPN seem sluggish. Two speed readings could be significantly different, even if you made them one after the other. That’s why sometimes, you may get better speeds in a country that’s thousands of miles away than in one that’s nearby. Even if all of them were of the same quality, the internet infrastructure varies from country to country. VPN servers are spread across data centers all around the world.
If the speed test was made during peak hours and peak weekdays, the numbers would probably be lower than those you might get on a Saturday night. A bigger server load means slower speeds. Each VPN has many more users than servers, which are shared between everyone connected at that time. Here are just some of the reasons VPN speeds may vary: Now imagine changing all three and others that weren’t mentioned yet. Changing any one of the parameters will have an impact on the results. What you see is a single speed reading from a single location during a particular hour and minute. The majority of VPN speed tests give you the numbers from a single moment in time. More problems with regular VPN speed tests But that’s just one of the issues when testing your VPN’s performance.
VPN review and comparison often use speed test results. Why 90% of the VPN speed comparisons make no sense