These days, a Virtual Private Network, or VPN in short, is not just a thing for the tech savants out there; it is quickly being embraced by the regular technology users also thanks to the attention user data privacy gets these days and also, because of the level of online freedom a VPN allows you. Here, we are going to talk about one of the major features people look for when they are going to purchase a VPN subscription: Split Tunnelling. Now, in order to understand this term, you should first understand what Tunnelling is.
With the help of Tunnelling, a VPN server privately transmits encrypted data to its subscribers’/ clients’ devices. It is considered a secure way of sending data over the internet, something which unauthorised users can’t snoop into. Think of it as sending someone with secret documents, meant for your eyes only (assume yourself to be a spy in the Middle Ages), through an actual tunnel whose existence is known only to you and the party that’s sent you the top-secret information. You’ll receive the sensitive documents and get to know the contents, while no one else apart from the sender will know if you have got the letter and its contents of it.
Split Tunnelling takes it up a notch. In a VPN Split Tunnelling, you can actually separate or split the internet traffic coming to your device. Now, why split the traffic when everything is encrypted as it is? For the purpose of speed. A VPN can allow you to become anonymous while browsing the internet with your exact location unknown but the encryption does cause the internet speed to fall down. With the split Tunnelling feature, you can actually choose to send a bit of traffic over the encrypted channel and the rest through the normal internet channels, thus compensating for the network speed issues. The feature sends the encrypted data through one tunnel and the other data through another tunnel.
Benefits of VPN Split Tunnelling
First off, your encrypted data that’s been put in one tunnel will arrive faster from the main VPN server. Also, the traffic which is not being encrypted from the other tunnel will also arrive faster. If the company you work at wants you to use a VPN, then it might have bandwidth restrictions, which is something split Tunnelling could help assuage by conserving bandwidth and hence, not cause performance issues.
Also, if you are working remotely, the encrypted connection that you would be using would help in accessing sensitive company data in a more secure way, with fewer chances of it being seen by an unauthorised party.
A VPN connection may cause trouble with your LAN connections. But with split Tunnelling, you will not have issues connecting with the devices connected over LAN. You can also get to stream content irrespective of the country you are located in.
