Renowned as one of the best VPN services available, NordVPN is in the process of upgrading many of its locations with 10Gbps servers.

Prior to this spate of upgrades, only NordVPN's Amsterdam and Tokyo servers supported 10Gbps, but as of December 21, over 20% of Nord's network has been upgraded.

By the start of 2021, NordVPN claims to have fully upgraded its London and Singapore locations, as well as several servers in the US.

It goes without saying that faster speeds will make the service more desirable, but seeing as most VPNs are still coping just fine with a largely 1Gbps server network, what will this change really mean for users?

The logic behind this upgrade is future-proofing: with 5G in daily use, ultra-fast protocols like WireGuard being developed, and VPN usage in general increasing significantly, 1Gbps server speeds will soon become a limiting factor

Therefore, the 1Gbps server speed is expected to become a limiting factor soon.

Therefore, rather than avoid costly infrastructure upgrades and limit user speeds in the long run, providers have made the decision to upgrade their most critical, high-traffic servers to accommodate increasingly faster technologies elsewhere.

NordVPN was one of the first major providers to make the change to 10 Gbps, or at least one of the first to make it public.

However, one of its rivals has begun the transition; Private Internet Access's "NextGen" servers all support 10 Gbps, which, combined with its huge server spread, is a significant threat on paper. In our tests, however, PIA was no match for NordVPN.

Currently, no provider other than PIA seems to be widely upgrading its 10Gbps servers. However, we would not be surprised if market leaders ExpressVPN and Surfshark announce something similar in the near future. Stay tuned.