From what I’ve read it seems to make your data more secure from your ISP, but does it somehow make your internet speed faster? I don’t understand all of the benefits of encrypting my data.
Doesn’t make it faster. It’s a way to tunnel into a private network and encrypt all the traffic between you and that network providing a secure connection between you and that network. One auxiliary use you commonly see is to funnel all traffic through this VPN connection and then access the internet from the network you’re connected to. So if I’m in San Francisco, and I VPN into a network in London, when I access the internet it’s going to look like I’m sitting in that office in London and accessing the net from there.
So what is [this person] (http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1vxgyi/google_starts_ranking_isps_based_on_youtube/cewscvn) talking about? It sounds like using a VPN is allowing him/her to load videos more quickly.
So you know how I said the VPN encrypts all traffic between two networks? Well when you’re using your ISP’s network without that encryption they’re processing all of your internet traffic and routing it to the correct places. They see different protocols for different applications, and they know where all that traffic is going. Some ISP’s use a concept called traffic shaping to look at all that traffic and say “Hey, 90% of all the traffic right now is going to XYZ site or over XYZ protocol and it’s clogging things up for all the users trying to do other things. Let’s throttle the amount of bandwidth that site or protocol can take up to help move things along for everyone else.”
So when you instead connect to a different network that uses a different ISP over a VPN, your ISP only sees a single encrypted connection between you and that network and has no idea what is going on inside that tunnel. This circumvents their traffic shaping because they A) can’t see what’s going on in that tunnel and B) the only routing they’re doing is making sure the VPN packets from your network are pointed in the right direction of the target network.
So if you think your ISP is doing some funny business with your connection (bittorrent traffic is a common one to throttle) funneling all your traffic over a VPN can be a way to get around it.
Wonderful explanation! Thank you! I have no clue whether my ISP is actually doing anything fishy or not, so I’ll probably just hold off on the VPN for now. However, would a VPN be a good idea if anti-net neutrality laws start becoming more common?