What is the Impact of VPN on Your Digital Devices?

Using a VPN connect will impact your computer or your mobile device. The level of impact is subjected to vary between different devices and their CPU processing capacity.

Here are some key factors that will help in determining the impact of VPN on your device or system:

1. The CPU or processing power of your device (Single Core, Quad Core etc.)
2. The quality of the VPN client software
3. The VPN algorithm which is used to encrypt or decrypt data.

Each of these factors are delineated below:

1. CPU or Processing Power of your device

The faster the CPU is, the smaller the impact on your system. The computers equipped with iCore3, iCore5 or iCore7 processors provide more than enough power to perform all the important processing and a VPN will not impact the user experience in a major way. The mobile phones with dual or quad CPU should also be able to manage a lightweight VPN client with zero hassles, but you must consider that heavy internet usage is tantamount to more work for the CPU. This leads to battery drainage at a faster rate. Mobile users should use the internet in the same way as before they installed the VPN client to experience the real impact it will cause on their device.

2. Quality of the VPN client software

Just like any other part of software, a well-designed VPN application will work with zero hassles, change IP address and will restrict its usage of system resources. There are many VPN providers that provide many cheap subscriptions, but their VPN client software turns out to be buggy which causes frequent crashes or take a long time to respond to the user actions. It is suggested to make the best of the high quality VPN providers like IPVANISH or ExpressVPN which will develop and test their software thoroughly.

3. VPN encryption algorithm

There are a few encryption options available via your VPN client and each one of these offer a different level of security. Stronger encryption like L2/IPSec means better security, but this will have a huge impact on your device’s CPU, as it will need to work harder to encrypt and decrypt your traffic because of high complexity of the strong encryption protocols. On the other hand, choosing a weaker encryption protocol like PPTP means that the demands on the CPU will be low however, so will be the security offered. Newer protocols such as the OpenVPN combines the best and delivers a quick and secure VPN service at minimal cost to your CPU. OpenVPN is the most suggested VPN protocol.