How Much Will Router Based VPN for Entire House Slow Down?

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1

I use a VPN on my devices, but my wife is clueless about privacy and can’t be bothered to experience any inconvenience for the sake of privacy or protection when it comes to the internet. I also have a small child that uses childrens internet services. If I install my VPN on my DDWRT router, how much will my wife or kid scream about slow internet? We pay for a 500GB line although we never get that.

2

You need to set it up and run some speed, and usage, tests before and after. You’ll have a baseline. I think it would affect it if they are hardcore users; gaming, streaming.

3

The speed of the vpn will largely be determined by the VPN protocol you decide to run in the router and also the performance of the CPU. The weaker the CPU the less it can handle the encryption/decryption.

To give you an idea I run on an Asus AC-86U. It has a 1.8 GHz dual core processor. I get about 80-100 Mbps download running v2ray + WS + TLS. Previously I had the Netgear R8000 with a 1 GHz single core CPU. Same protocol that only got me 30-40 Mbps download.

So choice of hardware is important. Also protocol will make a difference. Wireguard will be much faster than OpenVPN for example.

4

I guess I would question why bother for them? You’re at home so the only entity that can sniff your internet connection is your ISP. If they aren’t taking other protective approaches to avoid fingerprinting/tracking, all you are doing is moving the location of where your traffic can be sniffed. There are so many other ways they will be tracked if they are doing nothing else different that I do not see this as any sort of advantage.

5

Do the tests suggested the others mentioned. You’ll never get what u pay for because we have a weak regulator. You also won’t benefit from MTs passion for caching content in MRU, so your RTDs will increase depending on the geographical location of the VPN’s IP address.

MT’s service is terrible for real time apps and online gaming. This might effect the performance of your VPN. Can you choose a server in South Africa :south_africa:? Closer to mru than the UK or France.

6

I’m not sure what “privacy or protection” you think a VPN is providing you especially if you’re using things like Netflix and pretty much any social networking site.

7

Store bought routers with vpn encryption turned on can only handle about 40-60mb/s.

Mini-pc running pfSense (BSD) can handle about 100mb/s, faster with more expensive hardware.

Custom linux routers perform twice as fast as BSD routers (linux performs much better on multi-core pc’s than BSD).

I bought a $300 mini-pc with 4 gigabit ethernet ports, built a custom Debian linux server on it, openvpn easily fills my isp’s 200mb/s link. I’m thinking of upgrading my isp link to 400mb/s, pretty sure this router can handle that too. Our entire home network is connected to vpn at full speed, it’s great.

8

Thanks. They aren’t hard users. Wife watched Netflix and social media. Daughter is on YouTube kids. So, pretty light actually.

9

Thanks for all the info. I’ll read up more and do some testing.

10

Thanks for the info!

11

That’s what I use. So I’d use a Uk IP and get UK content. You might be interested in French programs.