ProtonVPN has recently unveiled a new feature called VPN Accelerator, which is said to improve VPN connection stability and can increase ProtonVPN’s speeds by over 400% in certain situations. Thanks to this new technology, you can always enjoy the best possible speeds when using ProtonVPN.
VPN Accelerator is enabled by default, works on all ProtonVPN apps, improves performance for all VPN protocols, and is available to all users.
How does it work?
VPN Accelerator comprises a set of technologies developed internally by ProtonVPN’s research team to better leverage the VPN’s large network capacity. Constantly expanding, this capacity currently exceeds 1 terabit per second (1,000 Gbps) and is one of the largest VPN networks in existence. For comparison, SwissIX, the largest internet exchange point in Switzerland, has a daily average network capacity of 80 Gbps.
However, capacity is just one piece of the “VPN puzzle,” and it is often not the limiting factor for VPN performance. The image below outlines how VPN Accelerator can unlock even higher VPN speeds by overcoming other limiting factors.
CPU limitations
Server CPU speed is often a limiting factor because many popular VPN protocols (including OpenVPN) do not use multithreading. This means the CPU power of a single core on the server processor becomes the limiting factor for speeds. ProtonVPN solves this problem by using multiple OpenVPN processes per server to fully take advantage of multi-core processors. Also, the server load is properly distributed between the multiple processes. This, in case you wonder, was solved by re-engineering the OpenVPN protocol.
Latency and TCP congestion
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) goodput is inversely proportional to latency and packet loss, which is why internet speed tests usually select servers as close to you as possible. To speed things up, the VPN Accelerator breaks up the 600 ms path into shorter paths (for example, two 300 ms paths) — resulting in higher combined performance over the entire path. It also uses a TCP delay-controlled TCP flow control algorithm called BBR along each path.
Improving “forwarding” efficiency
Most TCP congestion algorithms are quite sensitive to gaps or sudden delays in packet forwarding. It is therefore important to reduce any risk of a stall (a small duration where packets are either queued or dropped) as these stalls result in a strong reduction of TCP pacing and subsequent performance. And so VPN Accelerator addresses protocol-specific issues that can lead to stalls. For example, there are inefficiencies in the OpenVPN and IKEv2 core code that can sometimes cause the control socket to be blocked. By offloading interprocess communications to custom-written “companion” processes, it is possible to eliminate this class of stalls.
Also worth adding is that ProtonVPN avoids virtual servers, virtualization, or containers used by many other VPN services. Its entire infrastructure is installed on bare-metal servers, eliminating the need to forward encrypted packets between virtual machines or containers and their host machines. This further reduces latency and boosts speed.
How to benefit from faster VPN speeds?
Under normal usage, VPN Accelerator can increase connection speeds by 400% or more — particularly when connecting to more distant servers.
Because VPN Accelerator is built into all ProtonVPN apps, you don’t need to do anything to take advantage of this unique technology. VPN Accelerator also allows different VPN protocols to achieve similar performance. So, for example, with VPN Accelerator – OpenVPN with ProtonVPN offers similar performance to the usually much faster WireGuard.
Under ideal network conditions, VPN Accelerator may not make any improvements on performance. However, more often than not, network conditions are less than ideal. With ProtonVPN, no matter which server you connect to or where you are, you will always automatically get the fastest speeds possible.
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In conclusion, we’ll just say that we love how great VPNs are getting even better. If you want to try out ProtonVPN, hit the link below and take it from there…
Pros
Cons
- Easy to use apps for popular platforms
- Works with Netflix and Hulu
- Dedicated servers for Tor and torrenting
- There's a free version of the service
- No live chat support
- Doesn't work well with BBC iPlayer