AU9913
· 18h
That's for sellers, but not users. What I'm trying to figure out is if I just put this directly on my router and 2 cell phones if there is any decrease in speed. I'm assuming yes at some point but don...
1. The operator's pipe ÷ everyone currently using it. Biggest factor — same as any VPN. The operator's listing publishes a capacity field (e.g. "1 Gbps shared, US-East") and that pipe gets split across whoever's actively transferring. The reference daemon doesn't rate-limit per peer; fairness is emergent through TCP backpressure, the same way the rest of the internet handles shared links. In practice most peers are idle most of the time (nobody streams 24/7), so a well-provisioned operator usually delivers near line-rate even with hundreds of peers connected. If an operator over-sells, people switch operators — that's the market-enforced fairness.
2. Your end of the tunnel. WireGuard is fast but not free on your hardware. Modern phones/laptops with hardware crypto easily do several hundred Mbps. A router-as-VPN-client depends entirely on the router: an OpenWRT box on decent hardware (Belkin RT3200, Mikrotik, Ubiquiti) does 300–1000+ Mbps; a cheap consumer router doing software-only crypto might cap at 50–100 Mbps regardless of what the operator gives you.
3. Whether you share or split the config. If you put one WireGuard config on your router, every device behind it shares one "peer" slot at the operator. Router + 2 phones on a single router-level config = 1 peer to the operator, and your router does all the crypto. If instead each phone has its own config, that's 3 peers (router + 2 phones) and counts against the operator's IP pool three times.
Realistic expectation: with a well-provisioned operator and decent hardware on your end, expect 70–95% of your underlying line rate for normal browsing. The marketplace win vs traditional VPNs isn't "no slowdown ever" — it's that switching operators is one click if one disappoints, instead of a refund cycle.
For the "10 clients × 5 devices" scenario: the operator sees 10 peers, not 50. The 50 devices are invisible to the operator — they all flow through their respective peers' tunnels. If the pipe is 1 Gbps and 7 peers are idle at a given moment, the 3 active peers share 1 Gbps three ways. No protocol-level guarantee, just supply and demand.
