Cloudflare Inc. is expanding its lineup of consumer-focused services today with the launch of Warp, a virtual private network that promises to make mobile connections faster and more private.

All VPN services are built around the same basic principle. They encrypt the web traffic that comes out of a user’s device and route it through the VPN provider’s servers, creating a secure tunnel isolated from the outside world. The packets that flow through this tunnel can’t even be viewed by the carrier on whose infrastructure the data travels.

Cloudflare claims that Warp has an edge over competing mobile VPNs in several key areas, most notably performance. The service routes data through the company’s content delivery network, which serves more than 10 percent of the world’s internet traffic. Cloudflare compresses pages and catches them when possible so they take less time to load.

“We’ve built Warp around a UDP-based protocol that is optimized for the mobile Internet,” Cloudflare Chief Executive Matthew Prince detailed in a blog post today. “We also leveraged Cloudflare’s massive global network, allowing Warp to connect with servers within milliseconds of most the world’s Internet users.”

Another important detail is that Warp takes advantage of 1.1.1.1, the high-speed Domain Name System service that the provider launched last year. The VPN is built directly into the 1.1.1.1 mobile app, which Cloudflare claims can match the URLs that users enter into their browsers with website IP addresses faster than any other DNS offering. 

Besides improving performance, the provider’s decision to bundle the services should also speed up the adoption of Warp. Cloudflare claims that the 1.1.1.1 app has millions of users and has been growing at a rate of 700 percent month-over-month.

The provider plans to offer Warp under a freemium business model. There’s a free edition available today and a paid edition set to be released further down the line, which will in turn use Cloudflare’s Argo technology. Argo is a traffic optimization system inside the Cloudflare network that has been shown to latency by an average of 35 percent and connection timeouts by 27 percent.

In addition to providing higher speeds than competing VPNs, Warp promises to be more private. Cloudflare’s Prince pledged that the company won’t sell browsing data to advertisers, won’t permanently store this data on its servers and will subject itself to outside audits to prove it sticks to its word.

Cloudflare’s push to win over consumers is the first part of a two-phase plan. The next, Prince wrote, will involve going after the enterprise market with a business-grade version of Warp.

“While companies require their employees to install and use VPNs, even the next generation of cloud VPNs are pretty terrible,” Prince wrote. “Their client software slows everything down and drains your battery. We think the best way to build the best enterprise VPN is to first build the best consumer VPN and let millions of users kick the tires.”

Image: Cloudflare