How many people are using VPNs?

[traveller 0]

Not of any great importance, but I am wondering, just how many people, globally, use a VPN? Is there a growing interest in security, or do people just not conern themselves? I notice that AirVpn has about 3,000 regular users. Is there an estimate?

[InactiveUser 188]

I don't have user numbers for you, but traffic estimates.

In North America, tunneling protocols amount to ~5% on fixed connections and ~10% on mobile connections.

I have attached two charts.

Source: 2014 Global Internet Phenomena Report by Sandvine (PDF)

https://www.sandvine.com/downloads/general/global-internet-phenomena/2014/1h-2014-global-internet-phenomena-report.pdf

 

 

I guess that only a small fraction of this tunneling usage comes down to privacy services - most tunnels will be business VPNs, SSHing back to one's home connection, and so on. The report I've used speculates:

The exact cause for the increase [in tunnel usage] is uncertain, but we suspect it may be indicative of subscribers with dongles using VPNs to

access regionally restricted content, as well as increased concern about privacy online.

So, there's definitely a trend towards tunneling, but only partly motivated by privacy concerns, and still very much a fringe topic. For what it's worth, the number of global Tor users currently stands at about 2 million:

https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html