ExpressVPN Introduces Lightway Turbo to Boost VPN Speeds on Windows

ExpressVPN has launched Lightway Turbo, an enhancement to its proprietary Lightway VPN protocol, promising significantly improved upload and download speeds without increasing latency.

Currently available for Windows users on Lightway UDP, the feature introduces multi-lane traffic distribution and advanced kernel-level optimizations to maximize VPN performance. Additionally, ExpressVPN has implemented Data Channel Offload (DCO) for OpenVPN on Windows, offering substantial speed improvements for users relying on the older protocol.

How Lightway Turbo works

Lightway Turbo builds on ExpressVPN's custom-built Lightway protocol, which was originally designed for speed and efficiency. The new upgrade works by creating multiple tunnels to VPN servers, allowing traffic to be processed across multiple CPU cores and even multiple server instances. This parallel processing approach increases overall throughput while maintaining security.

To make Turbo possible, ExpressVPN implemented several key upgrades in its Windows app:

• Custom Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) drivers – These allow Lightway to bypass certain kernel operations, reducing data handling overhead and improving efficiency.
• Multi-threading with dedicated read and write channels – This speeds up acknowledgment handling in Lightway TCP, though Turbo currently only supports UDP.
• Multi-lane traffic distribution – By spreading data across multiple paths, Turbo enables users on high-speed networks to maximize their bandwidth potential.

Currently, Lightway Turbo is enabled by default for Windows users running Lightway UDP or the “Automatic” protocol selection. Users with high-speed internet connections (900 Mbps or higher) or those connecting to distant VPN servers are expected to see the most significant performance gains. However, Turbo is not compatible with split tunneling at this time.

Speed boosts for OpenVPN with DCO

While Lightway remains ExpressVPN's primary protocol, the company acknowledges that many users still rely on OpenVPN. To improve OpenVPN's historically slow performance, ExpressVPN has introduced Data Channel Offload (DCO) on Windows, a feature that allows OpenVPN to process data packets within the kernel rather than in user space.

By keeping OpenVPN's operations within the kernel, DCO enables multi-threading and reduces overhead, leading to massive speed improvements. ExpressVPN's internal testing showed download speeds increasing by up to 2000% on OpenVPN UDP, with some users achieving up to 2 Gbps download and 1 Gbps upload speeds.

However, DCO will remain exclusive to the Windows platform due to compatibility limitations with other operating systems.

This latest upgrade follows ExpressVPN's broader efforts to refine and enhance Lightway. Just last month, the company completed a full rewrite of Lightway in Rust, replacing its original C-based implementation to improve security and performance. The transition to Rust significantly reduces memory-related vulnerabilities, aligning with the VPN industry's push toward safer programming practices.

Lightway Turbo brings benefits only to Windows users for now, but the company has indicated plans to expand Lightway Turbo to other platforms in the future.

For those eager to test the improvements, ExpressVPN suggests running speed tests with and without Turbo enabled to see the difference firsthand. If you haven't used ExpressVPN lately, check out our in-depth review of the product.