VPNs are very useful in lots of situations. My wife was in the hospital after delivering a baby, and whatever QoS they had going on in the router was making it

VPNs are very useful in lots of situations. My wife was in the hospital after delivering a baby, and whatever QoS they had going on in the router was making it painfully slow. Fired up PIA and off to the races, a normally functioning internet connection. There are a lot of networks where this is a legitimate use case. With cell phones such as they are today, people connect to public wifi frequently. There's another benefit of VPN that people don't discuss much: your traffic can be compressed with LZO. This can make an unusably slow connection usable. The applicability to web browsing may be somewhat limited if the sites you use all set up their gzip headers properly, but I think that's a stretch when you're going off major properties, and it will compress all the traffic at the network level regardless of protocol-specific options, so it should help some.