Speed · Plain-English answer
A good VPN keeps most of your normal connection speed, so judge it as a share of your baseline rather than a fixed number. For everyday use, a few megabits per second handles browsing, roughly five handles HD streaming and about twenty five handles 4K video. Latency matters as much as throughput.
A VPN cannot make your line faster than it is, so the fair question is how much of your baseline survives the tunnel. Measure with the VPN off, then on, using the same test, and compare. Losing a small slice to a nearby server is normal, while losing half your speed suggests a poor server choice or a local problem.
Try the comparison at /tools/speed-test/ with two or three servers before judging a provider, because individual servers vary with load through the day.
Browsing and email are comfortable on almost any working connection. Music and SD video need very little, HD streaming wants around five megabits per second per stream, and 4K wants roughly twenty five. Large game downloads simply take longer at lower speeds rather than failing.
For calls and gaming, latency and stability beat raw throughput. A steady thirty megabits with low ping feels better than a jittery hundred, which is why server proximity is the single most useful thing to optimise.
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