My screen freezes mid-sentence right as I'm walking a new client through wireframe changes on a Microsoft Teams call, and for three seconds I can't tell if I've lost the account or if Roma Norte's wifi is doing its usual thing. The banner flips to 'Network Quality Poor' before I've even finished my point, and somewhere in the back of my head I'm running through the checklist every digital nomad on a VPN eventually memorises: is this my connection, the flat's router, or ExpressVPN struggling to keep the video steady while it hides where in the world I actually am.
Quick disclosure, since it matters more in an article like this one: I use affiliate links here, and if you sign up for a VPN through one, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only talk about ExpressVPN and the services below because I've paid for every one of them myself and used them on actual client calls, not because a PR email showed up with a free account attached. The full transparency policy lives elsewhere on the site.
The Invisible Office and What It Actually Costs
Being a remote contractor is mostly fine until the one call where it actually matters — the pitch, the client kickoff, the moment your face needs to hold steady on Microsoft Teams instead of dissolving into a pixel soup. Nobody on the other end needs to know I'm answering from a rented flat with a temperamental router; they just need the call to behave like I'm sitting two floors up from a proper office. The stakes sound small until a client's IT department starts asking questions, and then very quickly they don't.
That fear got sharpest hopping between coworking spaces in Lisbon, where the wifi handles email fine and falls apart the second three people start a video call at the same long table. Remote work security sounds abstract right up until it's your own IP address bouncing between countries mid-call, and a client's compliance team notices before you do.
Why Does a VPN Make Microsoft Teams Calls Worse Sometimes?
A reader named Zoya messaged me from Doha a while back, and by the time she got to her actual question, you could feel the patience running out: why does a VPN make things worse sometimes, when it's supposed to be protecting the connection, not wrecking it? It's a fair thing to be annoyed about. Microsoft's own documentation lists a minimum bandwidth for HD video calls that sounds almost nothing — even patchy hotel wifi in Porto usually clears it without trying. The real issue was never how much bandwidth I had. It's how that traffic moves: Teams sends a constant real-time stream rather than checking every packet twice, closer to User Datagram Protocol than to a normal webpage loading, and a VPN sitting in the middle of that has to keep pace without adding a stutter. Some manage it. Others turn a two-second wobble into a dropped call entirely.
A Bad Connection in Bangkok Made the Difference Obvious
One trip through Bangkok put this to an actual test. The hotel wifi cut out often enough that I had to swap to my phone's hotspot mid-call more than once, and I was already running ExpressVPN, so I flicked between their Lightway setting and the older OpenVPN option just to see what happened.
On OpenVPN, every hotspot swap killed the call outright — I'd sit there hitting the smart-hub button on the hotel remote out of nervous habit, which never once opened the right app and just kept landing on some resort welcome channel, while I waited to see if the reconnect would hold. On Lightway, the handshake was fast enough that most people on the call never noticed a thing; my video blurred for a second, but the audio held. I texted Yemi about it afterwards, mostly to complain. She's never once sounded stressed about a bad connection — genuinely, it's a little unsettling — and her only reply was that it happens to everyone eventually, so I might as well stop being surprised by it.
How ExpressVPN Stacks Up Against the Rest
For calls specifically, not streaming and not general browsing, this is roughly how the ones I've actually used compare:
| VPN Provider | Key Strength for Teams | The Catch |
|---|---|---|
| ExpressVPN | Lightway protocol is incredibly stable for UDP traffic. | Only 8 simultaneous device connections. |
| NordVPN | Fast speeds, but the mobile app sometimes glitches on reconnects. | Price jumps significantly after the first year. |
| Surfshark | Unlimited devices (great if your partner is also on calls). | Smaller server network can mean more 'crowded' IPs. |
| CyberGhost | Massive 45-day money-back guarantee to test it out. | Noticeable speed drops on trans-Atlantic connections. |
Anyone traveling with a small pile of gear, two laptops, two phones, whatever else needs to get online, will find Surfshark's unlimited device policy genuinely useful, and the apps behave about the same whether you're on a phone or a laptop either way. For call quality specifically, though, ExpressVPN's eight-device cap has never actually been the bottleneck in my setup — everything I run at once fits with room to spare.
Watching a Call Nearly Die in a Porto Café
It reminded me, in a roundabout way, of a dumber mistake from earlier on — paying for a second streaming subscription registered in a different country, convinced the library overlap between the two would cover whatever I couldn't already get. It didn't. The overlap turned out smaller than I'd guessed, I was paying twice for content I could already half access, and it taught me that throwing money at a problem doesn't fix it if you haven't actually worked out what's broken first. The same logic applies to VPNs and Teams calls, as it turns out.
The actual near-miss happened in a café in Porto. My partner walked in mid–screen-share and asked, not quietly, whether the internet was being weird for him too, and I remember the very specific drop in my stomach, not panic exactly, more the dread of doing frantic mental math on whether I could claim my camera was broken just to buy thirty seconds to reconnect without anyone noticing. Turning the VPN off would have fixed the connection instantly. It also would have handed my real location to anyone watching, which for a client with strict IT policies is its own kind of problem: an IP address that jumps from London to Portugal overnight raises exactly the kind of question I don't want to answer over email on a Friday afternoon.
Was Switching to ExpressVPN Actually Worth It?
Yes, ExpressVPN costs more than CyberGhost or Private Internet Access, and for a while I kept telling myself I'd downgrade once things settled down. Things never really settled down, which is sort of the nature of moving countries every few months, so at some point the calculation stopped being about price and started being about how many Friday afternoons I was willing to spend explaining a dropped call to a client. NordVPN is a solid runner-up if you don't mind the occasional manual reconnect, but Lightway's speed at picking itself back up is the one thing I haven't found matched anywhere else.
Somewhere around week seven of just leaving Lightway running and not thinking about it, the shift became obvious. I was in a café in Bangkok, of all places, when the University Challenge theme tune came on the TV behind the counter for no particular reason, and I caught myself sitting with my shoulders down where they belong instead of hiked up near my ears, which is not how I usually sit before a call. That's the actual lesson, if there is one: the right VPN setup isn't the one with the most features on the box, it's the one boring enough that you eventually stop noticing it's there at all. If your work depends on looking reliably 'present' on camera, that boredom is worth paying for. ExpressVPN is the one that's done it for me, consistently, across three very different countries and a lot of unreliable wifi.