Watching Live US streams - would a tunnel be faster?

usignuolo

I am a keen weather watcher and this time of year like to watch live streamed stormchasing. In theory it is free to the viewer, in practice if there are quite a lot of chasers in the same location, or the coverage by masts is patchy, I find the signal drops quite a lot, often at the critical time.

Would I get a better more stable live streaming service from the US, if I subscribed to Tunnelbear VPN service, which "tunnels" across the internet to give you a virtual private address in the US?

kwikbreaks

Unlikely. Where VPNs are advised for speed it is to beat ISP P2P shaping as they offer encrypted traffic so in theory the ISP cannot ddetect the traffic inside. If your streams are delivered by P2P it may help depending on ISP. Try the free option first - 500MB and tweet for an extra GB. That should be enough for you to judge.

In the main adding an extra server in the middle is more likely to slow things down. VPNs are aimed more at anonynymity or to beat location based service blocks than they are at speed which they can decrease but can't increase as they like you are governed by how good their source is.