How can you use a VPN to watch on a phone? 

Being able to watch movies, TV and sports on your phone is a very freeing thing. No longer do we need to rush home for the precise time something is going to start, as we did in the heady days of broadcast TV. Suddenly, the streaming revolution means we can sit on a train (with a pair of headphones, of course) and enjoy the football, or catch up on the latest Marvel movie from the comfort of a hotel room.

But there can be problems. Not only do streaming services prevent us from watching their shows while we’re outside the country we signed up from (a process known as geoblocking, or geographical restrictions) but some ISPs try to clamp down on the bandwidth we’re using, or have well-intentioned parental controls in place by default that will stop a grown adult from watching an 18-rated movie. Luckily, a VPN can help.

Data restrictions are usually put in place with innocent motives, but can be heavy-handed and catch sites in their net that were never meant to be restricted. Public Wi-Fi, such as that in holiday resorts or even shopping centres, can be particularly bad, as unlike with your home ISP or mobile data provider you have no way of ringing up the customer service centre and asking for it to be turned off.

Flick on your VPN, however, and the target and content of your internet traffic will be hidden, meaning you can stream more or less whatever you like.

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There are a couple of ways you can achieve this. The easiest is simply to have a VPN installed and configured on your phone, which will set itself up and route your internet traffic through the VPN’s server rather than that of your usual mobile data provider or the Wi-Fi hotspot you’re using. If you want to do this, you’ll need to choose a VPN provider that offers an iOS or Android app, and have enough ‘spare’ devices on your subscription that you can activate it on your phone.

Another way is to have one device with a VPN on it, then use it as a wireless hotspot to route your internet connection through, allowing every device that connects to it to use the VPN too. This can be a little more difficult to set up, but can be effective if you have several mobile devices – some laptops can offer a Wi-Fi hotspot for phones to connect to, but you’re more likely to need to use a phone for this, as the functionality is more common there.

The final way, and one that’s less useful if you want to stream video away from home, is to find a VPN that can be installed on your Wi-Fi router. This requires a little technical know-how and the right kind of router, but is possible. Do this, and every device that connects to the router will access the internet through the VPN rather than the standard ISP servers, and will bypass all their restrictions as a result.

If you’re using public Wi-Fi, which can sometimes have less than ideal security, your encrypted traffic also means anyone snooping on what you’re doing won’t be able to read anything they intercept, for an extra bonus.

It can do this because a VPN will encrypt your data connection so thoroughly that no one will be able to tell what it is. It also masks your IP address, which can make you appear to be surfing from a different country to the one you’re actually in. If you suspect your ISP is reducing the speed at which you’re surfing, a VPN can help alleviate this, though it’s worth noting that using a VPN can also slow down your internet connection, and you’ll need to find out if your connection is faster with it on or off, perhaps using a speed testing website.

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