Does a VPN slow you down? Why distance matters when you pick a server

Let's follow a single page load. You're in London, and you open a news site whose servers are also in London. Without a VPN, your request crosses town and the reply comes straight back. It takes a few milliseconds, and you never give it a thought.

With a VPN, the route changes. Your request travels first, encrypted, to WrapVPN's exit server, then continues from there to the website. The reply comes back the same way. That detour is the whole story of VPN speed, so it's worth asking how long it is.

Connect to our London server and the detour stays inside the city: you won't notice it. Connect to Frankfurt, roughly 650 km away, and your request goes to Germany and back before it reaches a site down the road. Connect to Singapore, about 11,000 km away, and it goes halfway round the world and back.

Same page, same Wi-Fi, same phone. Three very different journeys.

Data crosses the internet as light in fibre-optic cable, and light in glass is fast but not instant. A handy rule: every 100 km between two points adds at least 1 millisecond to a round trip, which is the time for a message to get there and for the reply to come back.

Apply it to the London page. Through Frankfurt, the detour adds about 1,300 km to the route, out to Germany and back to London, so each round trip gets at least 13 ms longer. Through Singapore, it adds about 22,000 km, so each round trip gets at least 220 ms longer.

Those are floors. Real cables follow coastlines and railways rather than straight lines, and every router along the way adds a little, so real figures are higher. No app update will change this part. Light has declined to go any faster for anyone.

Here's why it adds up. A page isn't one request; it's a conversation, and many of its steps wait for the previous reply. Suppose the page needs ten round trips, one after another, before you can read it. Through Frankfurt, that adds a little over a tenth of a second. Through Singapore, it adds more than two seconds, and you'll feel every one of them.

There's a twist. Many large sites keep copies of their pages in cities around the world, and they answer each visitor from the copy nearest the address they see. With a VPN on, the address they see is the exit server's, not yours.

So through Singapore, a global site answers from its Singapore copy. You pay for the trip from London to Singapore and back, about 110 ms per round trip at the very least, but not for a second leg back to London. A small site hosted only in London makes you pay for the whole journey there and back again.

That's why a faraway server can feel tolerable on one site and painful on the next. It's also why a site may suddenly greet you in another language: it thinks you're wherever the exit server is.

Distance hurts most when you're waiting on lots of small exchanges. Browsing, signing in, video calls, online games and typing into a shared document all feel it, because each step waits for a reply before the next one starts.

It matters much less once a big transfer is under way. A large download, or a video that's already playing, is limited mostly by the narrowest link on the route, and that's often your own Wi-Fi. A long round trip makes a download slower to reach full speed, but after that, distance fades into the background.

Encryption itself costs very little on a modern phone or laptop. WrapVPN uses WireGuard, which was designed to be light, and on most connections the processor isn't what holds you back. Older or low-power devices have less to spare, so they may feel it on a very fast line.

Two things can slow you down that have nothing to do with distance: a crowded café network shared by everyone in the room, or a busy exit server, which you share with everyone else connected to it. One thing can speed you up. With Clean Web on, a page heavy with ads and trackers has less to fetch.

Start with the nearest location. A server near you is usually the fastest, and the iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows apps show a speed figure beside each location: a lower figure is faster. In Madrid, pick Madrid. In Sydney, pick Sydney.

Choose a distant location only when you need that country. If your bank expects a UK address, London is the right answer even from Lisbon, and the extra distance is the price of that address. Switch back to a nearby location when you're done.

If something feels slow, compare fairly. Run a speed test with WrapVPN off and on, a few times each, close together and in the same spot. If both are slow, the problem is usually the local network rather than the tunnel. If only one location is slow, try another one nearby.

A VPN slows you down by about as much as its detour, and the detour is mostly distance. Keep the exit server close and you'll rarely notice it's there; send it across the world and you'll feel every round trip. Open WrapVPN, pick the location nearest to you, and check its speed figure before you go further afield.