How we test
Tests are carried out on a freshly installed Windows 10 desktop VM at a data centre in London. We connect to endpoints in the UK, Netherlands and USA. These are used to download content from reference servers physically located in London, Amsterdam and New York.
We do this via HTTP using curl at the Windows command line. All paid-for VPN services, which are unlimited, download around 600MB of data, to allow us to observe variation in download speeds over time. Free services, many of which have data or speed caps, are tested using a 65MB file.
This month’s reference speeds, recorded without any VPN, were 590Mbits/sec from London, 638Mbits/sec from Amsterdam and 478Mbits/sec from New York. While some top performers can come close to those speeds when connected to their VPNs, you should generally expect a performance reduction of around 25% to 50%.
Our setup is designed to test maximum possible throughput. If your internet connection is particularly slow, you may find that using a VPN, particularly to remote locations such as the US, can improve download speeds.
The disadvantage of using download speed as a proxy for overall performance is that it only provides a snapshot of a single metric at a single point in time. Unusually fast or slow results are retested.
We rely on several years’ worth of historic test data for a variety of popular VPN services to provide a long-term performance reference. All data is publicly available at
vpndatatracker.com for transparency purposes. We take historic performance into account in our overall ratings.
We also test video streaming performance, as many people explicitly want a VPN to watch overseas video content, and many more at least want to be able to watch local content unimpeded while connected to a VPN. For this, we tested videos exclusively available via iPlayer in the UK, Netflix in the US and Disney+ in the US.
As shown by our results, Netflix in particular has been cracking down on VPN users. When it detects that a VPN is in use, it will typically still show your videos, but will only provide access to content that’s local to the user’s home.
Disney+ typically blocks access entirely if it detects a VPN, while iPlayer both blocks access and sets a cookie to prevent further access from that browser even when you’ve disconnected from the VPN.