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Forum Discussion
bazhenm199
Apr 11, 2026Follower
VPN setup on NETGEAR router causing high latency and reduced speed
Hi everyone, I’m using a NETGEAR router (Nighthawk series) for home networking, mainly for gaming, streaming, and remote work. Recently I configured a VPN directly on the router to improve privac...
HappyCat
Apr 11, 2026Apprentice
Which specific Netgear router?
There are two ways to implement VPN on a customer router:
- VPN Host. This allows devices on the Internet to connect to the router through an encrypted tunnel, and thus have access to devices on the local network. This is the feature taht Netgear ofers with residential routers.
- VPN Client. This allows devices on the local network to access the internet through an encrypted connection to a VPN host such as NordVPN, ExpressVPN, etc. Netgear does not offer this feature on residential routers.
Unless a remote device is actively connected to the VPN, enabling this feature should have almost zero impact on performance of the router. If a remote device is connected to the router VPN in order to access the internet through the router, and thus 'appear' to be at the router location when the remote device may be somewhere else, performance is often affected by the upload speed of the ISP connection. Traditional cable networks, for example, often have very slow upload speeds. My Spectrum ISP offers almost 500Mbps download but only 11Mbps upload. (Yes, eleven) If I were to connect to my router over VPN and attempt to stream video from the internet, it would be horrible.