VPN server in the United Kingdom: the London exit server

A London exit answers different needs, depending on where you are when you connect.

For transatlantic traffic, the longest stretch is the one between the exit and the far coast. London is 5,600 km from the New York area and 5,700 km from Toronto, which puts the floors at about 56 and 57 ms. Chicago, further inland, is 6,350 km away, a floor of about 64 ms.

Frankfurt is 6,200 km from the New York area. Choosing London instead takes about 600 km off the transatlantic leg, roughly 6 ms on every round trip, and London is also nearer than Frankfurt to the transatlantic cables that come ashore in south-west England. The page on the Frankfurt exit explains the overland leg that an inland exit adds.

Within Europe the balance runs the other way. Frankfurt is 640 km from London, a floor of about 6 ms, so a service hosted in Frankfurt costs slightly more through London than through the German exit. London suits a working day split between western Europe and North America; Frankfurt suits one spent mostly on services in central Europe.

Ireland sits nearer still to North America. From Dublin, reaching a service in New York through London means 460 km east before 5,600 km west, while Cedar Knolls is 5,150 km away directly. For services on the US East Coast, Cedar Knolls is therefore the shorter path from Ireland by roughly 900 km, and London stays the nearer exit for everything European.

Every 100 km between you and the exit adds at least 1 ms to each round trip, since light in fibre travels about 200 km per millisecond and the reply covers the distance again. Real cables run along railways, roads and the sea bed, and each router queues packets for a moment, so measured latency sits above these floors.

For your own connection, the server list is the better guide. WrapVPN's exit servers publish no latency, so on iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows the app times a request to every location and shows a figure beside it; the Mac app lists locations without one. The apps take these figures when they load the list, so after moving to another network, close and reopen the app before comparing, or select 'Refresh' on Windows. Because each app times a different kind of request, compare figures taken on one device rather than across different ones.

From London, the great-circle floors and the nearest alternatives are:

Sites that localise by IP address treat a London connection as coming from a visitor in the United Kingdom. The changes are side effects of the address rather than settings in WrapVPN, and sites with a language or country control usually let you set them back.

For readers in Ireland, two of the changes matter: the currency moves from euros to pounds, and search results lean towards British sites. Language and date order stay as they are at home. For readers from continental Europe, the larger change is language, as English versions of sites tend to replace French, Dutch or German ones.

A few signals ignore the exit. The device's time zone and language, the location a browser reports once you allow it, and the country saved in a signed-in account all stay as they were. Neither the App Store nor Google Play takes its country from the connection, so your storefront stays the same through London.

The usual changes are:

Three kinds of public network are common for visitors to Britain: Wi-Fi at railway stations, in cafés and in public libraries. Each is shared with strangers, and each controls access in its own way.

Complete a network's registration page before connecting WrapVPN, for the reasons the guide to public Wi-Fi safety sets out. Some networks ask again after a period of use; disconnecting and opening a browser brings the page back into view.

For a visit within Great Britain the exit stays close, with floors of about 3 ms from Manchester and 5 ms from Edinburgh, so the tunnel can stay on all day at little cost in latency.

The tunnel encrypts everything that passes between your device and the London exit. At the exit it is decrypted and continues as ordinary traffic from the exit's IPv4 address, shared by every user of the exit, so the sites you reach see a British address in place of yours.

To forward your traffic, the exit server must see the address each packet is going to. HTTPS keeps the content of a connection unreadable to it, and most websites and current apps use HTTPS; anything sent unencrypted is readable on the exit server.

Our privacy policy describes what we keep, and two of its records involve the exit. A record is written each time you connect or disconnect, holding your account, the time, the exit server and how long the session lasted. Every hour, each exit server also reports a summary per tunnel address of the data transferred, the external addresses reached over TCP and the domain names associated with those addresses; that summary can be linked to your account.

With Clean Web on, DNS lookups go to a filtering resolver on the London exit server, which blocks domains by name. It does not inspect pages, and a browser or app that uses its own encrypted DNS bypasses it.