VPNs

[EskimoJoe]

Anybody have any experience with VPNs? What are they good for? How do they (more or less) work?

I hear you can use a VPN to bypass bandwith throttling from a service provider, but I don't think they work like that. Isn't it basically just a layer of encryption that hides your traffic from your service provider?

[Vulcan]

I hear you can use a VPN to bypass bandwith throttling from a service provider

Not really. In fact if anything they may worsen your experience as they are effectively a single stream (and most home routers/PCs struggle to do any decent encrypted throughput).