Suppose your business involves shipping goods back and forth between City A and City B. If you add a requirement that they go off to City C for a security check in the middle of each run, the trip will naturally take longer. The same is true when you stick a VPN server in the middle of your connection to a website. Things almost always take longer.
Before starting our VPN speed tests, we disable the cellular data network by putting the phone in airplane mode and then enabling Wi-Fi. The cellular connection isn't as stable, and it's also much more difficult to attack than Wi-Fi, as mentioned earlier. We test all of the products on the same iOS device, running the latest version of iOS.
For testing purposes, we use Ookla's internet speed test tool. (Note that PCMag's publisher, Ziff Davis, also owns Ookla). We average a series of tests, discarding the lowest and highest results. Then we immediately enable the VPN, connecting to whatever it recommended as the fastest server, and repeat that test. By comparing averages with and without the VPN active, we derive a score based on the percent change.
Ping latency is the time it takes for your device to query a server and receive a response. If that query must go through the VPN, latency typically increases, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot. However, we measure latency in milliseconds. Unless you're playing a fast-paced online game where extra milliseconds of lag can get you fragged, you won't notice a modest increase in latency.
A drag on download speed, on the other hand, will probably draw your attention. If downloading a new app takes twice as long, that's not good. And slow download speeds can cause streaming videos to pause or stutter. Fortunately, few of the iPhone VPNs we've tested had a big impact on download speed. In fact, one of them actually sped up downloads in testing.
When's the last time you uploaded a big file from your smartphone? Right, it's not a common activity. A drag on upload speed due to the VPN isn't likely to bother anybody. In truth, while all the iPhone VPNs we tested had some effect on upload speed, even the worst of them wasn't bad.
For this batch of reviews, we performed all the iPhone speed tests on exactly the same device and network, over the course of just two days, but that doesn't mean we'd get precisely the same results on a different day, nor that you would get the same results on another network. The extremes would probably remain extreme, but other results could well vary. In addition, for most people, speed shouldn't be the only factor in choosing a VPN. A convenient interface, a wide selection of servers, useful advanced features—these are also important considerations.
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