VPNs are pretty nifty tools for those looking for increased privacy. Basic methods of ensuring the protection of personal data just don’t cut it.

What will you do, make anonymous accounts, and choose stronger passwords? Your data will still be scraped, combined, and sold to various third parties. These third parties although have wildly varying intentions and separate ideas as to how to use your data, one thing is common across the board: none of them have intentions that benefit you in any way.

Protecting yourself online is impossible unless you have a VPN. That’s how critical VPNs are in 2022 and beyond.Although government institutions, financial organizations, and big corporates have been leveraging the tech for a while now, the average individual internet user also tends to gain a lot by using VPNs.

Here are the most important reasons for using VPNs in 2022 and beyond.

#4. Avoid buffering by bypassing ISP throttling

Your ISP places limits on the bandwidth of your internet connection while streaming content or even IPTV. This is especially true for accessing media content and streaming websites.

Using a VPN connection from any reputableVPN or dVPN provider will enable you to bypass such caps and throttling limits that are imposed on your internet connection (without your consent, by the way)and stream your favorite content and shows free of any throttling.

Throttling leads to buffering or a slower download speed over time. A 100 Mbps connection can end up using 50 Mbps only while streaming thanks to throttling. With a VPN, your ISP doesn’t know what type of content you're accessing, so they serve the same speed as they do for browsing even though you’re streaming IPTV.

#3. VPN routing can improve or steady streaming quality

Sometimes when you’re accessing IPTV content via a VPN, you can actually get a better speed and quality than on anon-VPN connection.

This happens as a result of the VPN server being physically close to where the content is originally hosted and it being free of any traffic congestion.

The claim that VPNs make your internet connection slower is very subjective. In certain cases like this one, VPNs canon the other hand improve the quality of your content streaming or increase your download speed. In some cases, they can just stabilize the connection more in times of congestion on the normal connection.

#2. Stream content regardless of regional blocks and censorship

Many service providers don’t operate in certain regions. At the same time, specific content on media providers can also be location-specific, and not accessible to you.

A VPN routes your internet requests via a different location. This is technically called “geo-spoofing”. With geo-spoofing, you can access content that’s not meant for your consumption without any issues because the content provider (or the ISP) doesn’t know where you’re really accessing from.

#1. Privacy advantages

As clear, VPN connections make your internet access private and undecipherable. VPNs allow you to maintain anonymity while accessing any type of content on the internet, including typical browsing.

This protects your privacy, identity, andIP addresses from agents you don’t want to share your information with including hackers, snoopers, government agencies, and your ISP.

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What does it mean for you, the average internet user?

The everyday internet user who doesn’t participate in anything that’s illegal (well, by definition, even making an online account with a fake name is illegal under the Computer Fraud and AbuseAct – but you get what we mean) also benefits from connecting to a VPN instead of the ISP’s network directly.

Barring special circumstances where VPN's are compulsory to use the internet, such as accessing your favorite content when abroad, general-purpose internet usage can still gain a lot with VPNs.

It’s also important to note that you should ideally be encrypting your entire network – not just one device. Even more true for households or apartments with multiple devices, this means you have to setup the VPN at the router level to make all the internet access through any of the devices connected to your home WiFi or ethernet from the router directed via the VPN connection.

Bottom line is that VPNs provide added privacy, anonymity, security, and censorship resistance among other things.

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Choosing the right VPN

Though we have other guides and comparison articles on different VPNs and types of VPNs, here’s a quick lowdown on choosing the right VPN service:

Free VPN apps or extensions

You can use free VPN services. If you need to use VPNs for a specific purpose such as watching Netflix or unblocking a torrent site specifically, then you are recommended to use a browser extension for free VPN. The free VPN connection is slow. Encryption isn’t provided outside of the browser if you go with a browser extension.

Paid VPN companies

You can use paid VPNs. Once you pay for a service such as NordVPN or IPVanish, they will allow you to download software that will automatically route your traffic through their servers. Paid VPN service speeds depend largely on your physical location and broadband speed, but they are always better than free VPN services.

Decentralized VPN

You can also use dVPNs. dVPNs are single-handedly the liberation of humanity, to say the least. They differ from traditional VPN services in the way that they run on nodes operated by the common internet user – like you and me. VPN services and even free VPN apps are centrally managed. It’s not rare to find a news story that uncovers how even this data is being sold or at least logged.

Decentralized VPNs are not run by any one company. They are run by all the nodes users set up the dVPN software on (can be a phone, laptop, desktop, or even a Raspberry Pi or a server in some cases).

These also speed up the connection by connecting to your destination using a better pathway and not the company-decided pathway. The more the nodes, the more efficient and secure adVPN network. And any dVPN network worth its salt has thousands of more nodes than any VPN service provider has servers.

One of the most efficient and secure dVPN services is Mysterium VPN which allows you to pay per gigabyte of internet used in cryptocurrencies. It comes with superior speeds which you can use to connect to any node from all over the world.