It is very unusual for internet service providers to restrict your bandwidth speeds, but why? Internet providers restrict the bandwidth of all of their customers, regardless of the speeds they pay for, at peak periods when the internet is used by a greater number of people than normal to avoid unpleasant events such as their servers collapsing.
They do this to ensure that their services do not get overloaded and have a visible effect, while if they leave it unrestricted, the servers they employ are more prone to crashes, resulting in a major outage and potentially inflicting damage to a large number of their servers. This would prevent its consumers from connecting to the internet, resulting in a significant financial loss for the business. Of course, this would be impossible to accomplish daily.
Another reason your internet provider may restrict your bandwidth is if your allotted amount is exceeded. The majority of ISPs cap your monthly usage at approximately 500GB (even though they advertise that you have an unlimited amount of bandwidth). This was originally done with the hope that by identifying which internet users were exceeding the limit they had established, they would be able to reduce and identify those who torrent illicit content. If you use a VPN, your data will not be noticed, and you will be able to exceed this limit without encountering resistance from your internet provider.
With this in mind, those individuals who currently suffer from poor internet connections may be more impacted by the restrictions imposed by the monopoly of internet providers.
Thus, returning to the original issue, can a VPN increase your internet speed? Given that all of your data is transmitted through your ISP (which often limits the speed at which data travels) and that your ordinary VPN does not, it is conceivable that a VPN may increase your speed and enable you to download and upload files more quickly.
Your speeds will theoretically drop since the VPN will have to go through the process of encrypting and decrypting the data you transmit and receive. However, when we consider that a VPN bypasses the bandwidth restrictions imposed by your ISP, this results in overall better rates. While these speeds are often hardly perceptible, having higher speeds is not a disadvantage!
If you’ve chosen to invest in a VPN just to improve your bandwidth speeds, you may not be making the greatest decision! You will have a better chance of increasing your speeds by changing your internet provider or altering the plan you now have with your existing internet provider.