VPN boosts internet speed?

Question

I have extremely slow internet speeds (Capped at 1mb/s download and 50kb/s upload). For some reason, I was messing around with different VPN's and suddenly noticed that while downloading a big while using Chrome while connected to a VPN boosted my download speed to 11mb/s!!!

I was downloading a large game installation file (500mb) and the game installed successfully after the download (played great too). Normally this download would take around 10 minutes but with HotSpot Shield it took under a minute!?! I tested with other downloads and the same boost occurred. Loading webpages was slow but continuous downloads were much faster than my normal connection and after checking the MD5s of the same copy of the file downloaded using a normal connection I found they were the same?

Is the VPN bypassing my ISP's internet throttle? Any other possible explanations? Possibly my IP does not throttle encrypted connections? I highly doubt any sort of connection could have reduced the size of the game to 1/5 of it's size (the game was already compressed many times for some reason).

Answer 1

There are a variety of factors that produce the speed of your Internet connection. The biggest factor is the bandwidth allocated to you. That pipe, which you say is capped at 1mb/s is the most limiting factor.

A VPN cannot increase the size of your pipe. In reality, a VPN gives extra security, at the cost of speed. The encryption process and added data means more overhead.

If what you say is true, then perhaps your ISP has a variable bandwidth pipe, allowing higher speeds when traffic is low.