VPN prevent bandwidth metering?

Discussion in 'privacy technology' started by thesmackdown, Mar 17, 2010.

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  1. thesmackdown

    thesmackdown Registered Member

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    Might be a pretty ignorant question but....

    I was wondering if subscribing to a VPN would prevent my ISP from know how much data is exchanged on my connection.

    Thanks!
     
  2. mvario

    mvario Registered Member

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    No it wouldn't, packets is packets.

    But your bandwidth usage will increase due to VPN overhead.
     
  3. thesmackdown

    thesmackdown Registered Member

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    Would it be by a percentage of use or just a fixed amount?
     
  4. mvario

    mvario Registered Member

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  5. hierophant

    hierophant Registered Member

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    Wikipedia tells me that "OpenVPN can optionally use the LZO compression library to compress the data stream."

    How would one tell whether that's been implemented?
     
  6. traxx75

    traxx75 Registered Member

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    After authenticating you should see "LZO compression intialized" and "comp-lzo" [under Local Options String] in your OpenVPN log :)
     
  7. hierophant

    hierophant Registered Member

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    Doh.

    Using XeroBank, I see ...

    "Thu Mar 18 HH:MM:SS 2010 LZO compression initialized"

    Thanks.

    Based on some googling, I get that the net impact of VPN overhead and compression depends on the entropy of the data stream, and that there's less overhead for UDP than TCP.
     
  8. SteveTX

    SteveTX Registered Member

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    There is a ~15% overhead in using encryption and encapsulation through VPN. I do not know how much space reduction LZO does by comparison.
     
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