FreshScribe is (finally) here: Here is what you need to know

Over the course of the past year, we’ve been rolling out our shiny new stack, FreshScribe, to our server fleet. However, being cautiously optimistic, we only deployed it to a portion of our network, leaving a reserve fleet on our old stack until FreshScribe was battle-tested.

The day has come where we are confident in FreshScribe’s superior performance and stability, and so we have flipped the reserve fleet to FreshScribe as well. Now every Windscribe VPN server runs FreshScribe!

With the fleet-wide roll out of FreshScribe, we are finally able to offer all of our users a wide range of new benefits, many of which have already been noted by members of our community, beginning with…

Hello Kernel-space WireGuard!

When we first started offering support for WireGuard back in 2020, we used CloudFlare’s user-space implementation, Boringtun. 

In our internal testing, we found that Boringtun was a performant implementation of WireGuard.

With time however, we realised that our implementation of Boringtun did not maintain the same level of performance at scale.

At times of peak usage, Boringtun would pin the processor, resulting in jitter and sub-par Wireguard speeds.

TL;DR: Boringtun sucked. So we replaced it with a kernel-space implementation of WireGuard – the results speak for themselves.

Speeds

In our tests, Windscribe is consistently among the fastest VPNs on the market - to the point that Windscribe’s free plan beats competitors such as NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and even Surfshark’s claimed 100 Gbps servers! Check out our recent tweets!

Jitter

Our users confirm that jitter on WireGuard has been eliminated as well! This resulted in a significant increase in stable gaming performance with Windscribe when connecting using WireGuard!

Streaming Performance

We also took this opportunity to overhaul the on-host microservice that facilitates streaming of geo-blocked content. Although streaming speeds vary depending on the speed of the residential proxy that is being used, (something we cannot influence) there are a few things we could do, and we did those things. As a result, users have also reported better streaming performance over the past few months. 

That’s Not All

We’re so excited about the following upcoming features we’re barely able to contain ourselves…

IP Pinning and Rotation

Want the same IP address each time you connect to a certain location? Want to rotate your IP address with the push of a button without disconnecting? We got you.

This is coming soon (no, actually soon - without the ™️) to all of our apps! For the tinkerers among you, this feature is available right now on the beta version of our desktop apps!

Please note that this feature is only available to Pro users (and to build-a-plan users for the locations they pay for).

Details to follow!

AmneziaWG

Our new WireGuard implementation supports all (server side and client-side) AmneziaWG features, supercharging our anti-censorship efforts! AmneziaWG 1.5 features are well supported, enabling obfuscation of traffic as QUIC, NTP, DNS, and any other UDP-based protocol.

AmneziaWG 1.0 features are enabled and supported as well.

User-testing in Russia, China, Iran, UAE, and Egypt has demonstrated great success in our anti-censorship endeavours.

We’ll be releasing more details shortly.

IPv6 Support

We heard you loud and clear. IPv6 egress support is being actively worked on - meaning you can expect dual-stack IPv4 + IPv6 connectivity when connecting to Windscribe in the near future.

IPv6 ingress support (connecting to the VPN server over IPv6) will take a little bit longer. 

Zero-Knowledge Connection Configurations

We currently store ROBERT configurations, port-forwarding configurations, and static IP settings in our centralized database. With FreshScribe, client apps will be able to bypass our configuration infrastructure entirely and push your settings of choice directly to the VPN server. Better privacy for you, and fewer resources spent maintaining infrastructure - everybody wins! 

Configurable Multi-Hop

This feature will allow you to connect to any Windscribe server location and double hop your traffic to any other Windscribe server, in any location! There will also be an optional (read: separately billed) ability to redirect your traffic through residential proxies in order to bypass any VPN block.