Optus Mobile Review ALDI Mobile Review Amaysim Mobile Review Belong Mobile Review Circles.Life Review Vodafone Mobile Review Woolworths Mobile Review Felix Mobile Review Best iPhone Plans Best Family Mobile Plans Best Budget Smartphones Best Prepaid Plans Best SIM-Only Plans Best Plans For Kids And Teens Best Cheap Mobile Plans Telstra vs Optus Mobile Optus NBN Review Belong NBN Review Vodafone NBN Review Superloop NBN Review Aussie BB NBN Review iiNet NBN Review MyRepublic NBN Review TPG NBN Review Best NBN Satellite Plans Best NBN Alternatives Best NBN Providers Best Home Wireless Plans What is a Good NBN Speed? Test NBN Speed How to speed up your internet Optus vs Telstra Broadband ExpressVPN Review CyberGhost VPN Review NordVPN Review PureVPN Review Norton Secure VPN Review IPVanish VPN Review Windscribe VPN Review Hotspot Shield VPN Review Best cheap VPN services Best VPN for streaming Best VPNs for gaming What is a VPN? VPNs for ad-blocking But a public network may also be a coffee shop, a friend’s local network or at a big event where hundreds or even thousands of people are connected to the same network. Using a VPN in any of these settings helps to make your online activities virtually untraceable, protecting your privacy often via thousands of server options around the world. VPNs mask your public-facing IP address by redirecting internet traffic through a remote server that acts as a VPN host. As far as the internet is concerned, all of your internet usage via a VPN is coming from the remote server rather than your own public IP address, so providers and other online third parties can’t see what you’re doing. Activated on an individual device, a VPN will mask the internet goings-on of that device only. If it’s activated at a local network level, as long as the VPN is active, all devices connected to the local network will have their online activities masked. A VPN can also be used to block intrusive or potentially dangerous online ads, too. By masking your public IP address, a VPN effectively anonymises all of your internet activities as long as it’s connected. This means that your browsing history won’t be visible by your provider or other third parties. It may be less of a concern on your home internet connection, but because anyone can connect to a public WiFi hotspot, these sorts of connections can expose your devices to hackers, and a VPN effectively puts your devices in the ‘too hard’ basket because it’s not as easily accessible. With Netflix, for example, the library you have access to is determined by the region you’re connecting from. While certain titles are identical, Australia has a different Netflix library to America, Ireland and Malaysia (to name a few). Netflix uses your public IP address to determine which library you should have access to, which means if you’re traveling with a device, you’ll notice the library change based on the country you’re in. A VPN can effectively spoof your location by connecting to a server in a different country, which gives your device an IP address from that country, so you can then access that region’s Netflix library. Keep in mind that VPNs tend to slow internet traffic – and the farther away the server, the slower the internet traffic – which can impact overall streaming quality. Oh, and using a VPN to bypass geoblocking is a big no-no as far as Netflix’s terms of service are concerned. That said, if your provider already has high latency, it may be the result of bad network routing, wherein your connection to a game server is jumping along an inefficient path of servers, thereby increasing your latency. A VPN may help improve your online gaming latency in this instance, particularly if you’re playing games on international servers. The good news is more and more VPN services support a range of devices and multiple device connections, which means you can feasibly use a VPN single subscription to protect computers and mobile devices in your home. For instance, CyberGhost lets you use up to seven simultaneous devices, NordVPN allows up to six, while ExpressVPN is capped at five. If you want to protect all of your family’s devices, Surfshark allows for unlimited devices.
