Hey Level1Techs,
I live in Taiwan and I’m trying to get a VPN and possibly a router/gateway that will make my internet usage more stable and enjoyable.
My current VPN service is Private Internet Access, and it’s worked quite well for me. But, its latency and stability have been problematic over the past few months and I am ready to try finding solutions. I am confident that my hardware is contributing to my problems, but I also think the path my traffic is taking is problematic as well.
In the near future, I’ll be building a desktop which should have a better network port than my laptop. My current system is definitely on its last legs, it was bought “open-box” and I’m pretty sure the previous user smashed it and that is what caused its RMA. Since then, it’s survived water damage but hasn’t really been the same since. Lately, I’ve been needing to Disable and Enable my network adapter (wired connection) to restore my internet connection daily.
I’m under the impression that a designated router or ‘gateway’ (sorry if I’m using the wrong term here) can improve the quality of my traffic by managing DNS and other details more intelligently. Is something like a Raspberry Pi (or other <$50 USD investment) capable of managing that and a VPN? My network connection is DSL and I’m allocated 50Mb/s both Up and Down.
What sort of investigation or research should I be doing to determine which VPN services would suit my needs best?
I’m wanting to play games with my friends in the US, so minimizing latency (and dropped packets) would be nice. There aren’t many region-locked services that I need access to, but having the option of using them would be nice, too. Besides that, I’d just like for pages to load when I try to load them, and would like for YouTube to be able to recognize that my connection can, in fact, handle 1080p or 4K streaming video instead of giving me 480p a lot of the time.