I always use Proton VPN on my laptop and phones for privacy, anti-big-tech tracking, gov’t tracking, etc.
A few months ago, I thought I’d like to add protection for the various phones, TVs, computers, and IOT things used in the house, other than just my laptop and phone. So I added the VPN to my TP-Link Deco AXE5400 Tri-Band WiFi 6E Mesh System (Deco XE75) and internet speeds decreased by 60%-70% (vs using the VPN on my laptop only) so I disabled it.
I’m considering trying it again but I have some questions:
- Does the router setup continually reroute to the fastest connection or does it stay connected to one location even if it gets overloaded and slow? (On my laptop and phone I have to disconnect and reconnect to a faster server a few times a day sometimes. If the router doesn’t do that then it will probably get unbearably slow sometimes.)
- I need to connect to various country VPNs a few times a day on laptop and phone. If the router is already routing through a VPN, does that mean I’d be “double VPN’d” when I connect to another country on the phone or laptop? If so, then it would probably be unusably slow, because many NON-US connections are already horribly slow with a direct connection (Mexico, Brazil, others).
- If adding the VPN to the router is not the best way to do it, any other suggestions for how to run the Google Chromcast dongle, DirecTV, Televisions, other phones, and a few IOT devices through a VPN?
Thanks!
if you keep your tin foil hat on, you can have 3 VPN’s enabled at the same time
Enable it on your router, and get on with a paranoia free life
If you install a standard server config, you will always be connected to one specific server in the country of your choice. On the other hand, if you install a country config, you will be connected to a random server in the chosen country.
Regarding your second point, if you connect to Proton VPN directly on your device, on top of your router connection, this counts as a second VPN connection and is indeed considered a VPN over VPN. This may cause you to fall under severe packet data loss and DNS leaks due to possibly overlapping sets of addresses, and that one VPN server will receive the packets that were due for the other VPN server, therefore incurring a severe data leak. Also, the first VPN server may be rendered unusable by the latter. With that in mind, it’s not recommended to use two VPN connections on top of each other in this case.
All things considered, if you’d like the ability to easily change the server you’re connected to at a given moment with a couple of clicks, it would be best to set up Proton VPN on each device individually. If you’re on a paid Proton VPN plan, you can connect to our servers on up to 10 different devices at the same time. As for supported platforms, the Proton VPN app is currently available on Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Apple TV, Android, Android TV, Chromebook, and we have a browser extension as well.
Thank you. Yes I am a paid customer.