- Lightway Turbo is ExpressVPN’s latest innovation that significantly improves bandwidth for upload and download speeds—without sacrificing real-time performance
- By leveraging a multi-tunnel approach, Lightway Turbo creates more tunnels to servers, each processing more data for faster throughput
- ExpressVPN is also enhancing speed on OpenVPN by implementing data channel offload—a modern technique that boosts bandwidth and efficiency
BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS; MONDAY, 10 MARCH, 2025 — Leading consumer privacy and security company ExpressVPN today announced the latest speed enhancements to Lightway and OpenVPN, taking performance to the next level for all users—whichever VPN protocol they select.
ExpressVPN’s latest innovation, Lightway Turbo, is a new feature that leverages multiple pathways to increase bandwidth, delivering greater speeds and performance for users. At the same time, ExpressVPN is also implementing data channel offload (DCO) on OpenVPN, a new modern technique that boosts bandwidth and efficiency. Both enhancements bring users an unprecedented speed boost for an improved browsing experience.
Pete Membrey, Chief Research Officer at ExpressVPN, said, “Speed is an integral part of the entire VPN experience, and we’re always striving to deliver a fast, seamless, and secure browsing connection. To achieve that, we constantly innovate at ExpressVPN to find the best ways to improve performance while prioritizing security and privacy. Today, we’re thrilled to unveil enhancements on Lightway and OpenVPN to serve every customer—no matter their protocol preference.”
Supercharging speed with Lightway Turbo
The introduction of Lightway Turbo revolutionizes VPN connectivity by simultaneously establishing multiple network tunnels to VPN servers. This approach enables the creation of multiple Lightway connections to multiple servers—effectively increasing available bandwidth and improving data transmission speeds.
By distributing network traffic across these concurrent tunnels, users experience a more robust, responsive, and accelerated VPN connection. The result is improved performance across download and upload speeds, achieving improved speeds of up to 330% during internal tests.*
“With Lightway Turbo, we’ve engineered a solution that increases bandwidth without compromising on latency to deliver what our users have been asking for—lightning fast speeds that maintain real-time performance,” said Membrey. “While rewriting our protocol in Rust across multiple platforms, we’ve simultaneously developed Lightway Turbo to provide immediate and significant speed improvements, enhancing our users’ everyday VPN experience.”
*Based on internal tests; speed improvements vary based on the server distance
Serving more users across different VPN protocols
At the same time, ExpressVPN is improving speeds for users relying on OpenVPN by implementing an innovative approach called data channel offload (DCO). This technology enables OpenVPN to process multiple data streams simultaneously and handle network traffic more efficiently. The result is significantly increased connection speeds and better overall performance, all while maintaining the robust security that users expect from OpenVPN.
Himmat Bains, head of desktop apps at ExpressVPN, said, “A portion of our users continue to rely on OpenVPN, and we’re fully committed to enhancing their experience—no matter which protocol they prefer. With DCO implemented on OpenVPN, we’ve seen significant improvements with internal tests recording up to a 2000% increase in performance on UDP traffic. This is a complete transformation of what OpenVPN can deliver, and we’re excited to roll this out to our users on Windows—for a better, faster-performing VPN experience.”
For more information, head to the Lightway Turbo blog post.
END
NOTES TO THE EDITOR
- Lightway Turbo is now available on Lightway UDP on the Windows v12 app. More platforms will be released at a later date.
- DCO on OpenVPN is now available on the Windows v12 app; it is a Windows-only update.
About ExpressVPN
Since 2009, ExpressVPN has empowered millions of users to take control of their internet experience. The company’s award-winning consumer VPN service is backed by its open-source VPN protocol, Lightway, delivering user privacy in just a few clicks. ExpressVPN’s Keys password manager, Aircove router range, and Identity Defender tools make digital privacy and security easy and accessible for all. ExpressVPN’s products have been extensively vetted by third-party experts, including PwC, Cure53, KPMG, and others.
Registered in the British Virgin Islands, ExpressVPN has been part of Kape Technologies since 2021. To learn more about ExpressVPN’s industry-leading privacy and security solutions, visit www.expressvpn.com.
Contact
ExpressVPN press team
press@expressvpn.com
