On average, the Proton shaved about 15 percent off my unprotected speed, but that number needs some context. In a place like Atlanta, Georgia, at noon on a Thursday, I experienced a drop of only about 3 percent. In Columbus, Ohio, on a Friday afternoon, that number increased to a 25 percent drop. This type of variation is normal. Providers like Surfshark and NordVPN see similar variations and have similar speed drops on average.
The difference with Proton is that I haven’t run into a really stinky server yet. I’m sure they exist (with over 15,000 servers, you’re bound to find one at some point), but I haven’t seen them after weeks of use. Windscribe and ExpressVPN are competitive with Proton on average, but they also have some locations where I saw a 40 to 60 percent drop in speed. Those results aren’t indicative of overall speed (you just switch to a different server), but Proton gets you there faster.
That advantage is likely due to Proton’s VPN accelerator. I admit, it seemed silly. In the Proton VPN app, you will find an option for VPN Accelerator, which boldly claims to increase speed by up to 400 percent; Not likely. Despite the acceleration, I don’t think VPN Accelerator will reach that cited number, at least in the vast majority of cases.
Still, there are some advantages, among which BBR stands out. Bottleneck bandwidth and round trip propagation time, or BBR, is a congestion control algorithm developed by Google that has been implemented on YouTube and Google itself. Instead of limiting the transfer of packets when they are lost, as most congestion control algorithms work, BBR models the network and estimates the available bandwidth. You do not need to see the lost packets to activate.
Proton’s speeds are not entirely attributable to BBR, but I suspect it helps when connecting to servers over long distances. When connecting in the UK, for example, I saw an average speed loss of around 20 percent, which is much closer to my US results than it should be.
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