4 ms·

A question for people with experience in this area: I've been considering setting up WireGuard so I can keep my mobile phone always connected to my home networ

A question for people with experience in this area: I've been considering setting up WireGuard so I can keep my mobile phone always connected to my home network. Will I experience degraded network performance (either latency or bandwidth) if I have my mobile phone always connected to a VPN 24/7? My phone is an iPhone 11 Pro and I would be running WireGuard on a Pi4

tyingq 7y ago
Some bandwidth and latency downgrade seems certain. Google, Netflix, and others invest a lot to cache content closer to your phone. A VPN circumvents that approach. The experience, though, is individual enough, that nothing other than trying it would tell if it it's "good enough" for you.
- nucleardog 7y ago
  You don't have to route all your traffic through the VPN (though it's unclear from the question whether or not that's the goal). If he only wants access to resources on his home network, it's entirely feasible to set that up while still routing other traffic out through the public internet via your ISP/carrier.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Ah, yes, sure...missed that. I had assumed it was all VPN.
  - doctoboggan 7y ago
    I should have mentioned above, but I want to use pihole as well so ideally I’d route almost all my traffic through my home vpn.
    - ricketycricket 7y ago
      You can still just have a local pihole dns server with your web traffic going out over your mobile isp.
ekianjo 7y ago
No degraded performance in my experience, at least not visibly. Only drawback is more battery consumption.
- doctoboggan 7y ago
  About how much more consumption?
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    I am not on an iphone but I would say 10 to 15 percent more.
  - DavideNL 7y ago
    On an iPhone you will not notice the difference, it's negligible
    - ottolin 7y ago
      It does shows around 15% battery usage in settings if wireguard is always on for my iPhone 11
      - DavideNL 7y ago
        I dont think you can express Wireguard's battery usage by that %. Imagine these 2 use cases: #1. You do not use/touch your iPhone for 24 hours. Wireguard will now show 40% of the total battery that was used. #2. You play the game Tetris for 24 hours. Wireguard will now show less than 1% of the total battery that was used. Because Tetris used the other 99,9%.
jonstewart 7y ago
I do this fairly often with an Algo vpn. Sometimes the initial connection setup suffers, but there can be a gain from adblocking if you use PiHole. I’ve had to turn it off a few times when some apps do geo-ip lookup and give me errors about not knowing whether I’m in the US. Otherwise the main drawback is battery usage.
- doctoboggan 7y ago
  Yeah I should have mentioned above but one of the reasons I want to do this is for pihole on the go. How much more battery usage would you estimate your setup causes?
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    This question gets asked a lot. Someone did a test and determined that always-on VPN (OpenVPN or Wireguard) on an iPhone consumes an extra 1% battery life compared to not using a VPN. Google may help find a source.
fulafel 7y ago
Depends on how you want to use it. If you want all your network traffic to go via your home network instead of normally over the internet, you will experience degraded network performance and it'll mostly depend on how fast your home network is & how far it is network-topologically from your phone.
JeremyNT 7y ago
I do this (with OpenVPN / Android, but same idea) and the main factor that limits my own performance is the poor upload speeds of my residential cable subscription. For many residential services, you're looking at asymmetrical up/down speeds, and they usually advertise the higher download number only. This is normally fine since you most people download way more than they upload and don't run servers in their homes, but when you route everything through your home, you may be limited by upload speeds.
moreorless 7y ago
I do this. Wireguard's iOS app with connect on demand is great. I get very close to the full speed of my home connection.

tyingq 7y ago

Some bandwidth and latency downgrade seems certain. Google, Netflix, and others invest a lot to cache content closer to your phone. A VPN circumvents that approach. The experience, though, is individual enough, that nothing other than trying it would tell if it it's "good enough" for you.

nucleardog 7y ago
You don't have to route all your traffic through the VPN (though it's unclear from the question whether or not that's the goal). If he only wants access to resources on his home network, it's entirely feasible to set that up while still routing other traffic out through the public internet via your ISP/carrier.
- tyingq 7y ago
  Ah, yes, sure...missed that. I had assumed it was all VPN.
- doctoboggan 7y ago
  I should have mentioned above, but I want to use pihole as well so ideally I’d route almost all my traffic through my home vpn.
  - ricketycricket 7y ago
    You can still just have a local pihole dns server with your web traffic going out over your mobile isp.

ekianjo 7y ago

No degraded performance in my experience, at least not visibly. Only drawback is more battery consumption.

doctoboggan 7y ago
About how much more consumption?
- ekianjo 7y ago
  I am not on an iphone but I would say 10 to 15 percent more.
- DavideNL 7y ago
  On an iPhone you will not notice the difference, it's negligible
  - ottolin 7y ago
    It does shows around 15% battery usage in settings if wireguard is always on for my iPhone 11
    - DavideNL 7y ago
      I dont think you can express Wireguard's battery usage by that %. Imagine these 2 use cases: #1. You do not use/touch your iPhone for 24 hours. Wireguard will now show 40% of the total battery that was used. #2. You play the game Tetris for 24 hours. Wireguard will now show less than 1% of the total battery that was used. Because Tetris used the other 99,9%.

jonstewart 7y ago

I do this fairly often with an Algo vpn. Sometimes the initial connection setup suffers, but there can be a gain from adblocking if you use PiHole. I’ve had to turn it off a few times when some apps do geo-ip lookup and give me errors about not knowing whether I’m in the US. Otherwise the main drawback is battery usage.

doctoboggan 7y ago
Yeah I should have mentioned above but one of the reasons I want to do this is for pihole on the go. How much more battery usage would you estimate your setup causes?
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  This question gets asked a lot. Someone did a test and determined that always-on VPN (OpenVPN or Wireguard) on an iPhone consumes an extra 1% battery life compared to not using a VPN. Google may help find a source.

fulafel 7y ago

Depends on how you want to use it. If you want all your network traffic to go via your home network instead of normally over the internet, you will experience degraded network performance and it'll mostly depend on how fast your home network is & how far it is network-topologically from your phone.

JeremyNT 7y ago

I do this (with OpenVPN / Android, but same idea) and the main factor that limits my own performance is the poor upload speeds of my residential cable subscription. For many residential services, you're looking at asymmetrical up/down speeds, and they usually advertise the higher download number only. This is normally fine since you most people download way more than they upload and don't run servers in their homes, but when you route everything through your home, you may be limited by upload speeds.

moreorless 7y ago

I do this. Wireguard's iOS app with connect on demand is great. I get very close to the full speed of my home connection.