Can using a VPN prevent my ISP from seeing data usage in 4G internet?

The VPN encrypts your traffic, but the amount of information that is sent and received will stay the same. This is not affected by the fact that you are on a mobile connection.

Depending on the encryption protocol that is used, it might even increase your data usage, but only by a (very) small margin.

In short: No, a VPN can never hide your data throughput, because the data still has to get to and from your phone. And on its way, it goes through your ISPs infrastructure, which you are paying for.

If you are concerned about privacy, using a VPN is useful regardless. But be aware that some VPN providers collect data about your behavior or will significantly slow your connection and increase latency - especially free providers.

lukasgabriel

Posted 2020-02-01T13:11:50.840

Reputation: 491

If anything the amount of data will increase slightly by using a VPN, due to the extra layer encapsulating the actual data you push through it. One site estimates the increase at anywhere between 10 and 20%, which can be significant on a low data cap.

– Mokubai – 2020-02-01T17:27:36.573

6It is possible for a VPN to mask actual data usage, but only by having the VPN end points send consistently large packets when real data is not being transmitted, and by ensuring that any smaller real packets get padded. Suffice to say, this will radically increase data usage. – Randall – 2020-02-02T14:29:51.030

Also note that some VPNs can compress data (only data that is not already compressed or encrypted - like plaintext HTTP, IMAP, NNTP or SMTP traffic; but not HTTPS, TLS, HTTP+gzip etc.), which might also make traffic somewhat smaller. For example OpenVPN can use comp-lzo option to compress data if enabled on both sides. So you can't hide that you've transferred data, but in some cases you could transfer less data that you would without VPN.

– Matija Nalis – 2020-02-02T15:20:58.713

So is it fair to say that your ISP will see 40 megabytes going to and from your phone, but where/how they originated is unknown? – BruceWayne – 2020-02-02T16:30:46.157

@MatijaNalis - good point. Many mobile browsers can also do this via a "data saver" option. – lukasgabriel – 2020-02-02T17:04:47.010

3@BruceWayne Assuming your VPN is not leaking DNS queries to your ISP, it will see the traffic as being in between your device and the VPN's servers. – lukasgabriel – 2020-02-02T17:06:01.903

1@lukasgabriel yeah, so it just seems the amount of traffic between my phone and a VPN, as if all traffic was just visiting 123.45.67.89 (let's say that's the VPN ip) but it doesn't see that I went to Google, stack overflow, etc. – BruceWayne – 2020-02-02T17:52:10.200

5@BruceWayne your ISP doesn't see which sites you visit, but your VPN provider does. So it's just changing who sees the data. Unless you set up your own VPN. Also woth noting is that a VPN might stop you from using your ISP's exemptions, like Facebook or Netflix not counting towards data usage. – Jan Dorniak – 2020-02-02T20:46:26.727

With some bad luck it counts even more than your real data .. because of sometimes used 8/10 encoding (8 data-bits -> 10 transfer-bits) - this is the 10..20 % increase mentioned by @Mokubai – eagle275 – 2020-02-03T14:27:00.987

13Data is data, the answer is No. No way to do what you want. – Moab – 2020-02-01T13:22:04.223

6The ISP can still track the amount of data you're sending/receiving from the VPN. It shouldn't know what you are doing though. – Natsu Kage – 2020-02-01T13:25:12.003

The answer from Google is that using a VPN will actually use more data.

– Mokubai – 2020-02-01T17:31:26.023

Data is data, your ISP only count bytes for billing purposes, no matter what the protocol being used. Is some essential detail missing in the question that might make you believe otherwise? – Rui F Ribeiro – 2020-02-03T11:51:34.920

1With one mobile ISP I was on, data on port 53 (that's normally DNS) didn't count towards the cap at all. They fixed that by blocking anything that wasn't legitimate DNS traffic about a year later. – JonasCz - Reinstate Monica – 2020-02-03T15:11:43.703

Can using a VPN prevent my ISP from seeing data usage in 4G internet?

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