On December 25th, Tenta began rolling out the culmination of more than a year's work making our VPN service the fastest anywhere. In the summer of 2017, as we began rolling out more VPN locations, we heard a lot of our customers tell us that our product was great but that our VPN speeds weren't. Unfortunately, many of the speed issues were due to the legacy code base in OpenVPN and the decisions made by mobile and other network operators.

But rather than just make excuses, we studied the problem and concluded that the only real solution was to go down to the very low levels of the VPN protocol and fix the root problems. Our requirements were initial connection time at least 1/2 the time of OpenVPN, useful stable connections even over 2G and equivalent or better security. We're happy to say we've met our goals, and then some. Typical initial connection setups are an order of magnitude faster (that means you'll almost never see the "VPN is connecting" message - it happens so fast you cannot see it on typical connections). We've tested extensively on slow and congested networks, and the slowdown due to using Tenta's VPN is almost unnoticeable. Finally, in addition to upgrading to the latest versions of important cryptographic protocols, we've made the connection mimic a normal web page when it's observed by a third party snooper. Hence the name, Mimic VPN.

Starting on Christmas, Mimic has been available for our beta testers on most of our locations. In the coming weeks we'll be rolling it out to all of our existing users and locations. We'll also be doing a series of more in-depth posts on the difficulties of VPN speed, the testing and work we did to figure out the problems and the exact solutions we've chosen in Mimic to turbocharge browsing. In the meantime, if you'd like to try mimic, you can join our beta program in the Google Play Store.

If you are one of our beta testers, please leave us feedback using the in-app feedback button. Good or bad, it will help us make Tenta even better. And if you're not quite ready to use Mimic VPN yet, then you can turn on device wide VPN which still uses the same OpenVPN it always has, as mimic only applies to browser only VPN for now.

Happy New Year and Safe Browsing.