How does Speedify work?

How does Speedify combine all of your internet connections to make your streaming more reliable?

Under the covers, Speedify is a multipath Virtual Private Network (VPN), which has been designed from the ground up to be able to bond across multiple internet connections, and seamlessly handle wireless failures so that apps and streams go off without a glitch even on slow and unreliable networks.

Speedify has a number of features that enable this magic:

  • Bonding: With our channel bonding technology, Speedify lets you use multiple internet connections for increased throughput and redundancy. This means Speedify is able to combine your Wi-Fi, mobile data, Bluetooth, and wired connections at the same time to speed up everything you do online. The Speedify app interacts with our Speed Servers in the cloud to seamlessly and efficiently distribute all the data transferred across your various internet connections. 
  • Pair & Share: This unique feature allows you to easily share Cellular connections back and forth between multiple Speedify users (devices) on the same local network, without the need for additional cables or adapters. The feature works almost like a turbocharged personal hotspot, but instead of just one device sharing its connection with another, once paired, both devices can share and receive each other’s connections simultaneously. The more devices you pair with, the more connections you’ll have access to!
  • Cost Aware:  Speedify is cost-aware, allowing you to provide Priorities to control how much each internet connection is used.  
  • Enhance Streaming Mode: When "Enhance Streaming" is enabled (the default), Speedify watches the traffic you send, for port numbers, hostnames and consistent data rates that suggest that you are live streaming or taking part in a video conference.  Once detected Speedify will mark that as a "Stream" and will:
    • Prioritize the packets, so that if there is not enough bandwidth to do everything, that the live stream will go through before other, lower priority packets (like software updates),
    • Bonding, Speedify becomes willing to use Secondary connections to send packets in parallel to boost the speeds,
    • Redundancy, If the primary connections are dropping packets, Speedify will automatically start sending the high priority live stream packets on the multiple connections, and delivering the first copy of the packet to get through.  This greatly improves reliability and reduces jitter, but at the cost of higher data usage.
  • Security: Speedify encrypts your traffic so that other people on the same Wi-Fi hotspot--or even your ISP and mobile carrier--can not see your data or what sites you are visiting. Speedify offers encryption tailored to your device. On newer devices, Speedify uses AES, since these have hardware AES engines. If your processor does not support AES acceleration, Speedify will use the ChaCha encryption algorithm to deliver fast, secure performance, which works even on older phones.

At a high level, the architecture of Speedify consists of several major components:

  • Speedify Client:  This is the Speedify app that runs on your phone or computer.  It acts as a VPN client, creating a "TUN" virtual network device.  Traffic from other apps on your device go into this device and the Speedify client then encrypts the packets, and decides which internet connection to send each packet on.  This VPN design makes it possible to spread individual packets amongst multiple internet connections (bonding). By splitting all your web traffic at the packet-level, even large, single-socket transfers, such as streaming movies and uploading and downloading files, can be given a major speed boost. It works in the background to help every app on your device!
  • Network Traffic: Speedify uses a variety of network protocols to connect across the internet to the Speed Server.  By default Speedify attempts to use TCP for maximum performance.  However based on performance and firewalls, Speedify will automatically shift to UDP or HTTPS for best results.  Many guest Wi-Fi networks for example only allows HTTPS web browsing, so being able to emulate this protocol keeps Speedify working wherever our users are.   
  • Speed Servers: Speed Servers in the cloud act as middlemen between you and the rest of the internet. After connecting to one of these Speed Servers, the Speedify app works in tandem with it to intelligently divide your internet traffic and deliver the combined speed of all available connections. This what makes it appear to websites that you are located where our servers are hosted.  Dedicated Servers which are only available to you and members of your Speedify Team are available as well.

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