Terms that sit next to each other
- Open network: no password at all. Anyone nearby can join, and the radio link itself is not encrypted for you.
- Guest network: a second network on the same router, usually with a password written on a card. It separates guests from the owner's own devices, which does nothing for what the owner can see.
- Hotspot: a phone or router that shares a connection. Your own phone's hotspot is yours; a stranger's hotspot is a public network with a friendlier name.
- Captive portal: the sign-in page a café or hotel shows before you get online. It is a gate, not a safeguard.
- Home Wi-Fi: public to nobody, but still run by someone, whether you or your internet provider.
- Office Wi-Fi: run by an employer who may set rules about tunnels. Those rules come first.
Where people mix the words up
The most common mix-up is "password-protected" and "private". A café that prints a Wi-Fi password on the receipt has a protected network, yet everyone who bought a coffee knows that password. Another is HTTPS and VPN. A padlock in the browser protects the connection to one site; a tunnel covers the whole phone, including apps and name lookups that never show a padlock.
A third is "VPN" and "proxy". A proxy website hands your request to a middleman for a single page, a tunnel carries everything the phone sends. The two are not interchangeable, and the page on proxy sites in this section goes through the difference.
A word about the word "free" and the word "safe"
Neither belongs to the connection. "Free Wi-Fi" says who pays for the line, and "safe Wi-Fi" is a claim someone made. Look instead at who runs the router, whether you were asked for a password and whether the sign-in page loads over a padlock.
The service behind this site sells VPN keys, so take our description of what a tunnel does as an interest-bearing view. Tunnel rules vary from one country to another and shift over time; obeying local law and the terms of every network and service you use stays with you.
What this section covers next
Each page below takes one word or one question that comes up around public networks. The proxy site page separates a middleman page from a tunnel. Pages on "what is my IP", IP lookup and "who is my ISP" explain what an address reveals and to whom. A DNS leak test and changing DNS explain what the name lookups are. Pages on unblocking websites and YouTube describe the mechanisms in plain terms only. A page on Telegram's own proxy setting, one on server locations and one on an Indonesian IP address explain why we have no server in Indonesia. Pages on VPN China, Japan and USA locations and on travel say what a foreign exit point is and what it is not, and a short one on fast VPN says what speed depends on.