• JDubbleu@programming.dev
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    9 months ago

    I’ve had ProtonVPN for 3 years now and I have 0 complaints.

    It’s the only VPN I’ve ever used that doesn’t have less bandwidth on VPN than off. I regularly saturate my gigabit connection for hours at a time with 0 issues or throttling, and tunnel my torrent client’s traffic through it 24/7. It also allows me to watch 4k content on mobile data without throttling and circumvent my phone provider’s restrictions on hotspot/tethering that they want me to pay $30/month to remove.

    Best $5/month I’ve ever spent.

    • Tak@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      I had no idea you could use a VPN to circumvent mobile data throttling. Fucking amazing info, mate.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        If you can, it’s actually a bad thing because it means the Telco is violating net neutrality by picking and choosing certain traffic to zero-rate.

          • grue@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            It violates the principle and is therefore a bad thing regardless of what the law is.

      • JDubbleu@programming.dev
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        9 months ago

        Glad to help!

        The reason it works is because telecom providers use DNS-based throttling instead of deep packet inspection to selectively limit bandwidth to video sites. They have a massive list of all the popular streaming sites (YouTube, AppleTV, Netflix, etc.) and then throttle the sites in the list. When providers say “unlimited 480p video streaming” they actually have no clue what video quality you are watching. They just pick a bandwidth limitation that would only allow 480p video to play without buffering.

        They could in theory use network traffic analysis to identify video websites which have bursty bandwidth patterns (due to the nature of video buffers), but this would be more difficult, more expensive, and extremely prone to false positives.

      • akilou@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        This doesn’t make any sense. Your phone service provider can’t see what you’re doing, but surely they can see how much data you’re using.

        • XTornado@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          He added more info, is for site/media specific restrictions. Like only 480p video or stuff like that.

          As other said, it doesn’t follow net neutrality but…that depens on country and other stuff.

    • phoneymouse@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      My complaint about ProtonVPN is they don’t support custom DNS in the apps. It would be nice to use NextDNS.