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Test server: NovaBridgeVPN · London, UK
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Everything you need to know about internet speeds and VPN performance.
Speed test numbers only tell part of the story. Here is what the figures actually mean for your everyday experience online.
Internet speed is determined by a chain of factors, any one of which can become a bottleneck. The most common culprits are your broadband connection type, the quality of your home router, the number of devices sharing your network, and how far your Wi-Fi signal has to travel.
Full-fibre (FTTP) broadband delivers the fastest and most consistent speeds because fibre-optic cable runs directly from the exchange to your property. Fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) connections share copper wiring for the final stretch, so speeds degrade with distance from the street cabinet — properties further than 500 metres from their cabinet often see noticeably lower throughput. Traditional ADSL over copper is the slowest widely available option, typically capped below 24 Mbps.
Network congestion is another major variable. Most ISPs over-subscribe their infrastructure, meaning bandwidth is shared with your neighbours. Download speeds between 8 pm and 10 pm — known as the peak-time window — can drop 20–40% compared to speeds at 2 am. Running a speed test at different times of day reveals whether congestion is a problem on your line.
Hardware matters too. Older routers cap Wi-Fi throughput at 150–300 Mbps regardless of your broadband package. Even on a 1 Gbps fibre connection, a router limited to Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) will rarely deliver more than 200–250 Mbps to a device across the room. Upgrading to a Wi-Fi 6 router, or simply plugging in via ethernet, often yields the single biggest real-world speed improvement.
According to Ofcom Connected Nations reports, the UK median download speed reached approximately 80–85 Mbps in 2024, driven by rapid full-fibre rollout across urban centres. However, medians mask wide regional variation: homes in rural areas on ADSL often receive under 10 Mbps, while urban full-fibre subscribers commonly see 500 Mbps or more.
Upload speeds remain the UK's weakest point — many FTTC packages cap upload at 10–20 Mbps even when download reaches 80 Mbps. This matters for video calls, cloud backups, and working from home. Full-fibre packages typically offer symmetric or near-symmetric upload, making them significantly better for remote workers.
A VPN introduces two sources of overhead: encryption processing and routing distance. Every packet your device sends must be encrypted before transmission and decrypted at the VPN server — this adds CPU work and typically reduces raw throughput by 5–15% on modern hardware and connections.
Routing distance has a larger effect on latency than on raw throughput. Connecting to a VPN server in London from a UK-based device adds minimal latency — usually under 5 ms. Connecting to a server in New York adds the transatlantic round trip (roughly 70–90 ms), which is noticeable in real-time applications like gaming and video calls but invisible when streaming or browsing.
Counterintuitively, a VPN can increase your effective speed in certain situations. Some UK ISPs throttle streaming services during peak hours — Ofcom has documented this practice. By encrypting your traffic, a VPN prevents your ISP from identifying and deprioritising video streams, potentially restoring full-speed playback. Users who notice buffering on Netflix or YouTube in the evenings often see improvement after connecting to a nearby VPN server.
Protocol choice matters significantly. OpenVPN TCP prioritises reliability over speed — ideal for bypassing firewalls and restricted networks such as corporate Wi-Fi or hotel connections. WireGuard uses a leaner codebase and achieves significantly higher throughput, often within 2–5% of an unencrypted connection. NovaBridgeVPN uses OpenVPN TCP 443, optimised to minimise overhead while maintaining full compatibility with restrictive networks.
Latency — measured in milliseconds (ms) — is the time a single packet takes to travel from your device to a server and back. It is entirely distinct from bandwidth: a slow connection can have low latency, and a fast connection can have frustratingly high latency.
For web browsing, anything below 100 ms is imperceptible. For video calls (Zoom, Teams), Ofcom recommends a maximum of 150 ms one-way to avoid perceptible delay. For online gaming — where your inputs must register before the next game frame — latency above 80 ms becomes noticeable, and above 150 ms gameplay degrades significantly. Competitive players typically aim for under 30 ms.
Jitter is the variation in latency between successive packets. A connection with 20 ms average ping but 15 ms jitter will feel worse than one with a stable 35 ms — because variable delays cause audio glitches on calls and erratic frame timing in games. Voice-over-IP applications are particularly sensitive to jitter; values above 30 ms cause audible quality problems.
To reduce latency, use a wired ethernet connection, close background applications consuming bandwidth, and choose a VPN server geographically close to your destination. For UK users, connecting to a UK-based NovaBridgeVPN server keeps round-trip latency well below 20 ms to most domestic services — fast enough for gaming, video calls, and real-time applications without compromise.