Honestly, I've waned off my need for a VPN (I can live without FB, NYT, Twitter, Youtube, Slideshare, and Google is really pretty good most of the time). I don't envy my friend's router for its VPN functionality, but I do for the fact that it transforms Shanghai's snail's paced internet into a product that reminds me of the computers in the Stanford libraries. He explained the technology to me a few months ago; the details escape me, but the gist of it is that it is constantly pinging thousands of computers all over the world.