More often than not, schools and universities restrict access to certain parts of the Internet. They do this whilst having the best of intentions and all students are subject to their acceptable use restrictions.
However, school firewalls aren’t perfect. They sometimes blacklist legitimate resources and as a result, leave students with a laundry list of websites they can’t access from school premises.
Most times, non-academic sites like social media platforms to YouTube, Netflix, or eBay will end up on the block list of college servers. Entertainment aside, many of those blocked platforms can contain a wealth of educational content. Some academic websites like homeworkdoer.org that could help students with their coursework assignments may also be blocked by these restrictions.
More often, server restrictions end up causing more harm than good. Schools are supposed to be environments that foster free access to information instead of censoring it. Therefore, a VPN is an essential tool that can help you protect your right to online freedom, privacy, and security.
In this article, we are going to talk about the benefits of VPN routers and tell you some facts about buying yourself a Wi-Fi router with VPN built-in or setting up one manually. The advantages of a VPN router for a college student are as follows;
1. The protection of multiple devices
One of the most obvious benefits of a VPN router is it gives you the ability to protect any number of devices simultaneously. This is especially important since VPN service providers limit the amount of devices that can be protected using a single subscription. Therefore, if you need to protect more, you will either need to buy additional device slots or upgrade the subscription to support more devices. However, when you simply setup a VPN router which will only take a single device slot, you can connect any desired amount of gadgets to it.
2. Protection of different types of gadgets
Another great advantage of a VPN router is the fact that it protects any kind of gadget connected to it. In modern houses, classrooms or offices there are smart TV’s, video game consoles, Planners and activity trackers, E-readers, and many others. Most of these devices are completely foreign to most VPN services. This effectively makes them into comprehensive sources of your everyday information that are completely unsecured against any interested third parties. Well, with the use of a VPN router, you encrypt all of your traffic, no matter where it comes from, be it from your car or a fridge.
3. They are time-saving
Now, to simpler benefits; since you only need one router imbued with a VPN, you will be free from the burden of setting up a VPN on each one of your devices that you use in your room or household. This can be huge task if you have to work with many gadgets on an everyday basis.
4. Protection of your academic or business data
From this comes another benefit. With a VPN router, just like you can grant protection to your employees and clients if you are running a business, you can also grant protection to your classmates and peers. This is great for students who work in groups and will notably benefit your relations with your team. Because, when people feel safe, they are in a better mood for cooperation.
5. Precautionary measure
Finally, with a built in VPN router, you won’t have to worry if your VPN is on or not, it will always be on. This might seem like a small thing, but in reality, all of your internet security risk measures go down the drain every time that you forget to turn your defenses on. This is has proven to be the greatest challenge that bothers corporate IT security: not the lack of precautions, but an everyday mishandling of them.