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This "unlimited bandwidth" thing VPN services claim...
As always: I am a complete n00b, but I am eager to learn. If point out where I might have misunderstandings, I would be forever grateful!
There's no actual way to have unlimited bandwidth (in terms of Gbps), right? I think the confusion in terminology is actually between bandwidth and "data cap"?
So what is the typical actual bandwidth (Gbps) that's being offered to the customer? Do VPN services reserve do some kind of QoS? Or do they let the customers battle it out and that's why they have those "Overloaded" indicators? Is it usually 10 customers sharing a Gigabit link? 50 customers? 100?
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Let me give you a fine example. You are limited to many things, including your own upstream that you are using to connect to your VPS. Data usage on a real wold(residential) is grossly over estimated. If you are streaming youtube 24/7 at 720P, your monthly data usage would be around 1080GB, up that to 1080P and you are looking at ~2160GB of data per month.
Are there heavy users? Yes. But most people won't be burning TB of data per month with legitimate usage and those who will, most likely are doing so by doing things, that are not kosher, which would get them kicked out soon enough.
Your Can might be able to go upto 200MPH but you will get a speeding ticket for driving at 100 and most likely will get into an accident for driving at 150 MPH
. But have fun even trying to reach 100 on a regular basis .
laughs in german
Okay Autobahn people shrugs in what ever NY has
Nothing is unlimited and most people that are using more then a few terabytes are usually doing something illicit. I'm a "cord-cutter"; I don't have tv/cable service, just an internet connection and a bunch of streaming apps on smart TVs and fire sticks with 3 people in the house...with my home office and all of that streaming my internet usage averages about ~700GB/month. I read an article recently that said that based on a survey for 2018 or 2019 (can't remember) the average usage for cord cutters was in the 500GB-600GB/month range.
People often over estimate their bandwidth requirements/usage and providers don't mind offering "unlimited" bandwidth to lock in a sale knowing that most users are only going to use a few hundred GB/month on average (VPN and hosting providers alike). The ones that do use a lot more bandwidth are often abusing the system.
It really depends on how important your data is to them. Sometimes it's worth the pennies to serve you a bit more bandwidth.
Correct. Unmetered / unlimited is just marking words to grab attention. Only few uses noticeable BW
There probably are some heavy users but the avg user will use way less. I only use like 30GB/month on Windscribe.
I wouldn't count on your typical consumer aimed VPN provider having any real QoS.
Take PureVPN (and their big brand resellers) for example, they sell their normal unlimited 5-device package as low as $10/yr via the right links (and even less with multi year commitments), whilst paying out affiliates 40-60%. That's less than 40cent a month per customer to work with.
Fortunately, due use to a combination of usage patterns (most people are normal browsing with the a few movies a week maybe via p2p) and that they broker deals with big providers with I guess unrestricted inbound (.e.g a few years ago they rented dedicated servers from Softlayer singapore) they can usually deliver some level of worthwhile service.
As to how many customers share a gigabit connect endpoint, think 1000+, you can count on there being more customers connected to a node at any time than the number of accounts on your typical dog shit cpanel hosting server.
tl;dr - it's not unlimited bandwidth, don't have high expectations, most VPN providers do deliver an okay level of connectivity