It’s not unusual for a VPN service to slow down the speed of your internet since it’s required for the encryption and protocol. However, it should not be noticeable enough to impact your internet activities.
If you are seeing a significant and noticeable loss in speed, one or more of the following reasons may be the causing the problem:
- Wi-Fi pollution: You are in an environment where many different WiFi networks or devices are operating in confined spaces.
- Your current Internet connection (even without VPN service) does not allow a better/faster connection.
- Your device (PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone) or your wireless router does not allow a faster connection due to technical conditions.
- Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) provides different quality for your connections (due to poor routing, different speeds may result from different regions or pages).
- You are too far away from your wireless router.
- Obstacles are blocking the connection. If there are multiple walls between you and your wireless router, set up the location of your router so that there are as few obstacles as possible to your connection.
- A high load on the devices (if high utilization is already present by other products) slows down as well the logging and encryption of the VPN.
With a VPN service you change your virtual location. Depending on the distance to the connected server (or the country where the server is located) you may see a difference in connection times. For example, the connection from the USA to a server in France takes much longer than a connection from two servers both located in the USA.