ExpressVPN unveils Lightway Turbo to boost VPN speeds

ExpressVPN has announced the introduction of Lightway Turbo, a new feature designed to enhance VPN speeds by increasing bandwidth without compromising performance.

The new development by ExpressVPN aims to increase speed and performance through a multi-tunnel method that creates more pathways to servers. In addition, the data channel offload (DCO) has been introduced to OpenVPN to enhance bandwidth and efficiency, promising substantial speed improvements for all users.

Pete Membrey, Chief Research Officer at ExpressVPN, highlighted the importance of speed in VPN performance. "Speed is an integral part of the entire VPN experience, and we're always striving to deliver a fast, seamless, and secure browsing connection. To achieve that, we constantly innovate at ExpressVPN to find the best ways to improve performance while prioritizing security and privacy. Today, we're thrilled to unveil enhancements on Lightway and OpenVPN to serve every customer—no matter their protocol preference," he said.

Lightway Turbo, which is enabled by default, introduces a method that simultaneously establishes multiple network tunnels to VPN servers. This setup expands the available bandwidth and improves data transmission rates, resulting in significantly faster download and upload speeds. Internal tests have reported an improvement of up to 330% with this development.

Membrey further explained, "With Lightway Turbo, we've engineered a solution that increases bandwidth without compromising on latency to deliver what our users have been asking for—lightning fast speeds that maintain real-time performance. While rewriting our protocol in Rust across multiple platforms, we've simultaneously developed Lightway Turbo to provide immediate and significant speed improvements, enhancing our users' everyday VPN experience."

ExpressVPN is also making advances for users of OpenVPN by adopting the data channel offload technique, which processes multiple data streams at once and manages network traffic more effectively. This results in considerable speed increases while maintaining the security expected from OpenVPN.

Commenting on the improvements, Himmat Bains, Head of Desktop Apps at ExpressVPN, said, "A portion of our users continue to rely on OpenVPN, and we're fully committed to enhancing their experience—no matter which protocol they prefer. With DCO implemented on OpenVPN, we've seen significant improvements with internal tests recording up to a 2000% increase in performance on UDP traffic. This is a complete transformation of what OpenVPN can deliver, and we're excited to roll this out to our users on Windows—for a better, faster-performing VPN experience."