WireGuard is big news at the moment as VPN services rush to add it to their list of supported protocols. VyprVPN is the latest company to announce that WireGuard is now available to use in all of its apps.
It has been in beta for a while, but is finally out of testing in version 4.0 of the Vpyr apps. If you already subscribe to VyprVPN but have no idea what this is all about, then we explain what is WireGuard in a separate article.
But, put simply, it’s a new option you can pick for encrypting data when using the VPN. There were already several choices – just as with most VPNs – but most people just use the default settings, never venture into the options and wouldn’t know which one to pick anyway.
And that’s perfectly reasonable: up until now, the default protocol was probably the right choice.
WireGuard, though, is worth finding among those options because it can double the speed of your VPN connection, especially if you are using a local server within a few hundred miles or kilometres.
You’ve probably noticed, or heard about, how VPNs can slow down your internet, and that was an inevitable disadvantage of using one. But with WireGuard, you should notice that slowdown far less.
VyprVPN already had its own proprietary Chameleon protocol which was primarily for accessing content when you’re behind a particularly tough firewall (such as inside China). It was based on OpenVPN but while that protocol was always hailed as the fastest, WireGuard is even quicker and can also cope when your phone switches, say, from your home or office Wi-Fi to mobile data without dropping the VPN connection.
Of course, it goes without saying that WireGuard isn’t magic: it can’t make your connection faster than your internet supplier is providing to you, or faster than your device can handle. But so long as you have fairly quick internet to begin with and you don’t need to connect to a VPN server on the other side of the planet, then you should notice an improvement in speed.
The other benefits are worth it, too, and because it uses so much less code than older protocols, using WireGuard can actually improve battery life when you’re using a VPN on your phone or laptop.
You can subscribe to VyprVPN here, and you can check out our other recommendations for the best VPN services to use.
