I live in Australia, and connections speeds here atrocious unless your one of the lucky few with FTTH. I’ve tried TOR before, but the speeds were unusably low (highest I ever got was 30 kb/s). Are VPN’s the same or do they work completely differently?
On selection of VPN server: Due to the metadata retention laws (or major pushes to pass them), it is unlikely to be helpful to select a VPN server that is inside of AU/NZ. To find the nearest optimal places for VPNs we can look at this map of where the undersea internet cables are. http://www.submarinecablemap.com/
From the map, it appears that the best choice for Western Australia is Singapore. Eastern Australia has better infrastructure and has reasonable connectivity to Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Manila, and Hong Kong. (There’s also a submarine cable that hits the Vancouver area, but CA has unfortunately also adopted aggressive data retention laws.)
So to get the best speeds, you should look for VPNs that have servers in these areas. It also helps to do some research on VPNs that do not severely oversell their subscriptions as you’ll get terrible speeds regardless of distance or location if the servers are overloaded with users.
Distance DOES impact your speeds as well, so closer is better. The exception to this rule is island nations that may have a large number of small hops instead of major data centers with direct long-distance routes. (Malaysia for instance)
most reputable vpn providers will usually have a dedicated line or similar high speed link. speed is dependant on a few factors, but finding a server close to you is a prominent one for maximum throughput.
have a browse through this subreddit, as there’s been quite a few questions like this recently with regards to Ozzie vpn providers.
If you’re talking TOR as in TheOnionRouter, that’s not a VPN. TORGuard is a VPN provider though. Just a heads up.
Also, this could be random numbers, but I’ve heard to expect at least a 30% drop in speeds (down and up) when using a VPN. Choosing a server with lower pings and less distance will help raise that.
Cheers
I use PIA to stream tv shows and it is slower than my already slow connection.