Working from cafés and coworking spaces

The café's Wi-Fi is one network shared by everyone who has bought a coffee. Your laptop's traffic crosses the same air and the same router as theirs, and the café, or whoever runs its internet, is in a position to see which sites every device looks up.

Most of what matters is already locked. Your email, your bank and your work apps use HTTPS, which protects the content of each connection. What HTTPS doesn't hide is where you're going: the names of the sites, and when you visit them.

With WrapVPN connected, those names and destinations travel inside the tunnel to our exit server, and the café's network sees a single encrypted connection. Our exit server then forwards your traffic to each site. It can't read anything protected by HTTPS, though it could read a site that doesn't use it, which is one more reason to prefer the ones that do.

If the café has a sign-in page, finish it before you connect. Until that page is done, the network carries nothing else, a VPN included.

Calls are where people worry a VPN will get in the way. The encryption itself costs little; what matters more is how far your traffic travels. On phones, tablets and Windows PCs, each location in the app shows a speed figure, where lower is faster. On any device, the one near you is usually best.

Say you're working from a café in Madrid and calling a colleague in Frankfurt. Connect to Madrid, and your call reaches our server across town, then carries on to the call service much as it would have done anyway. Connect to Sydney instead, and every word goes round the world before it reaches Germany.

What a VPN can't do is improve the café's connection. If twenty laptops are sharing a slow line, the call will struggle with or without WrapVPN, and your phone's own data is often the better fix. On a phone, moving from Wi-Fi to mobile data doesn't stop the tunnel, so the switch is painless.

A coworking space is a step up: a members' network, often with a sign-in page or a separate password for each member, run by people who think about security. It's still shared, though, by every company in the building.

So the routine is the same: complete the sign-in page if there is one, then connect. The difference is the equipment you'll want to reach, like the shared printer or the screen in the meeting room.

On a Windows laptop, those can go missing while you're connected. WrapVPN has Windows block any traffic that would bypass the VPN, so nothing slips out unprotected, and a printer on the local network may be out of reach until you pause or disconnect. Pause WrapVPN, print, and it resumes by itself a few minutes later.

Sooner or later the Wi-Fi drops, and the backup is your phone's hotspot. Your laptop joins the phone, and you're working again within a minute.

There's a catch worth knowing. WrapVPN on your phone protects your phone; the laptop using its hotspot is a separate device sending its own traffic, so it needs WrapVPN running on it as well. No plan has a device limit, so install it on both and sign in with the same account.

Clean Web earns its place here. When the backup connection is your mobile allowance, stopping your devices from looking up known advertising and tracking domains means fewer connections spending it. Clean Web is on by default on Android and off on iPhone, iPad and Mac, so switch it on there; on Windows, check the switch.

If you're working for someone else, their rules decide what runs on a work laptop. Many employers have their own VPN for reaching company systems, and some require it whenever you're outside the office.

Follow them. A work laptop is set up and looked after by your employer, so don't install WrapVPN on it without their agreement, and use the company's VPN where they ask you to. On a phone, only one VPN runs at a time, so a work VPN and WrapVPN take turns rather than stacking.

That still leaves plenty for WrapVPN to do: your own phone, your own laptop, and everything you do on them that isn't work.

Install WrapVPN on your laptop and your phone with the same account, and turn on Clean Web while you're at it. After that, every stop follows the same three steps: join the Wi-Fi, complete any sign-in page, then connect.