IPVanish has shipped a feature that addresses one of OpenVPN’s oldest complaints: it’s slow compared to WireGuard. The provider’s new High-Speed Mode, available now in its Windows app, claims download speed improvements of up to 196%, according to TechRadar’s report on the rollout. That’s not a marketing rounding error. It’s close to tripling throughput on a protocol that’s spent years losing speed comparisons to newer alternatives.
What High-Speed Mode actually does
The feature is IPVanish’s implementation of OpenVPN Data Channel Offload, usually abbreviated DCO, a kernel-level optimization that moves the heavy lifting of encryption and decryption out of the application layer and into the operating system’s core. Traditional OpenVPN handles that cryptographic work in user space, which is more flexible but carries meaningfully more processing overhead. DCO shifts it into the kernel, cutting latency and reducing CPU load without changing the underlying protocol or its security properties.
Subbu Sthanu, General Manager for Consumer Cybersecurity at IPVanish, framed the target audience as streamers, gamers, and remote workers, the users most likely to notice a throughput ceiling on OpenVPN and switch to WireGuard purely for speed. High-Speed Mode is IPVanish’s answer to that switch: keep users on OpenVPN, where its wider compatibility and long track record still have advantages, while closing most of the speed gap that used to push people away from it.
The tradeoff nobody should skip reading
There’s a real catch, and it matters depending on why you use OpenVPN in the first place. High-Speed Mode is not compatible with OpenVPN Scramble, IPVanish’s obfuscation feature that disguises VPN traffic to look like ordinary encrypted web traffic rather than an obvious VPN tunnel. Turning on the speed boost turns off the obfuscation, and vice versa. You can’t run both at once.
For most users in permissive networks, that’s an easy trade: obfuscation exists to get around VPN blocking on restrictive networks and in countries with active VPN detection, and if that’s not your situation, there’s no reason not to take the speed. For anyone relying on OpenVPN Scramble specifically because they’re on a network or in a country actively blocking recognizable VPN traffic, though, High-Speed Mode isn’t an option without giving up the obfuscation that makes the connection possible at all.
How to turn it on
The feature requires updating to the latest version of IPVanish’s Windows app. Once updated, it’s a toggle inside the OpenVPN protocol settings in the app’s Settings tab, no separate download or account change required. It’s opt-in rather than a default change, so nothing shifts automatically for existing users who don’t go looking for it.
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Why this matters even if you don’t use IPVanish
OpenVPN’s speed disadvantage against WireGuard has been one of the most consistent findings in VPN protocol testing for years. Providers running WireGuard implementations (NordVPN’s NordLynx, ExpressVPN’s Lightway is its own separate protocol built for similar reasons) built their newer, faster tunneling technology partly because OpenVPN’s overhead was pushing users toward providers who’d already solved that problem. Our own WireGuard vs OpenVPN comparison has documented this speed gap consistently across the VPNs in our test database.
DCO isn’t unique to IPVanish. It’s an open-source capability that’s existed in OpenVPN’s ecosystem for a while, but implementing it well inside a consumer app, with a clean toggle and no broken compatibility elsewhere, takes real engineering work that most providers haven’t shipped yet. If High-Speed Mode performs as claimed in independent testing, expect other providers still leaning on plain OpenVPN to follow with their own DCO implementations within the next year, the same way obfuscated servers and kill switches went from a differentiator to a baseline expectation once enough providers shipped them.
How DCO compares to just switching to WireGuard
The obvious question is why anyone would bother optimizing OpenVPN at all when WireGuard already solves the speed problem more thoroughly, with a smaller codebase that’s easier to audit and lower overhead by design. The answer comes down to compatibility and policy, not raw preference. Some corporate networks, older router firmware, and certain restrictive network environments still support OpenVPN specifically, or block WireGuard’s UDP-based handshake pattern while letting OpenVPN traffic through unaffected. Users locked into OpenVPN for reasons outside their control (a work-mandated client, older hardware, a network that flags WireGuard specifically) are exactly the audience DCO is built for, since switching protocols isn’t actually an option for them.
For everyone else with a free choice, WireGuard or its provider-specific implementations (NordLynx, Lightway) still tend to edge out even a DCO-optimized OpenVPN connection in independent speed testing, though the gap that used to justify avoiding OpenVPN entirely has narrowed considerably with this update.
A wider industry trend: squeezing more out of existing protocols
High-Speed Mode arrives alongside a broader push across the VPN industry toward post-quantum encryption and protocol hardening rather than entirely new tunneling standards. Most major providers have already rolled out post-quantum-resistant key exchange on at least one protocol, with Surfshark and Proton VPN expected to widen their post-quantum coverage later this year and NordVPN and ExpressVPN broadening theirs as well. Optimizing what already exists, whether that’s post-quantum key exchange or kernel-level offload for a decades-old protocol, has become as much a competitive battleground in 2026 as launching something brand new, and IPVanish’s update fits that pattern closely.
Where this leaves IPVanish’s overall standing
IPVanish’s speed limitations relative to WireGuard-first competitors have been a consistent weakness in independent testing, including our own database. A near-tripling of OpenVPN throughput doesn’t automatically put IPVanish ahead of providers whose native WireGuard implementations were already faster to begin with, but it meaningfully narrows a gap that used to be one of the clearer reasons to pick a different provider if OpenVPN was your protocol of choice, for compatibility or policy reasons at work, for instance.
This is a genuinely useful feature, not just a marketing number. Moving encryption into the kernel is a real technical improvement, not a benchmark trick, and it addresses OpenVPN's most-cited weakness directly. The obfuscation tradeoff is the one thing to know before flipping the switch: if you're on a permissive network, turn it on with no downside. If you rely on OpenVPN Scramble to get a VPN working at all somewhere restrictive, this feature isn't for you yet, and that's worth knowing before you update expecting a free speed boost with no strings attached.
What to check if you try it
Update the Windows app first; the toggle won’t appear on older builds. Once updated, run a speed test with High-Speed Mode off to establish a baseline, then again with it on, ideally against the same server at roughly the same time of day, since network congestion elsewhere can muddy a single comparison. If you normally rely on OpenVPN Scramble to get past a workplace or network-level VPN block, confirm you actually need it before flipping High-Speed Mode on, since the two can’t run together and losing obfuscation on a network that blocks unobfuscated VPN traffic will just break your connection entirely rather than speed it up.