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virtual private network, or VPN’sIt has become a popular way to protect our privacy online. They work by routing your Internet traffic through servers owned by the VPN company, encrypting it, meaning the website or service you’re visiting sees only the VPN server’s address rather than your phone or PC as the starting point of your connection.
There are many benefits of a VPN. This can improve the security of your connection if you’re concerned that someone might access your private information, and it’s especially useful if you’re using a public WiFi hotspot, which often has relaxed security in the name of allowing multiple people to access it.
VPNs act as another layer in the already complex mix of networking software and protocols that allow you to connect to the Internet, and as such, can have an impact on the speed of your connection. Typically, this adds an additional overhead, meaning your maximum download and upload speeds will be lower than those advertised by your ISP. But if your ISP engages in throttling – where it intentionally slows down a particular type of traffic, often related to gaming – then a VPN can actually help increase your speeds by hiding the nature of your traffic from the ISP and preventing throttling from occurring.
The best VPNs for speed are the ones that impose the least overhead on your connection, with their servers operating at the speeds you’d expect from your ISP alone. I am busy testing options to find the best one.
The best VPNs for speed in 2025 are:
how i tested
I used a fiber-optic Internet connection with a maximum bi-directional speed of 600Mbps for these tests. This is well ahead of the average UK line speed of 74Mbps, and should give a better impression of the type of overhead a VPN is adding. While the 600Mbps figure sounds good, few lines operate at that speed all the time, and on a test day, I saw 547Mbps download and 476Mbps upload from it. I then connected to different VPNs and used Google’s Speed Test widget to see the impact on data transfer rates. You can read my full testing methodology at the bottom of this article, and we have a full guide on it here How we test VPNs But Independent If you want more details.