According to the technical white paper released by the vsee boxes company in 2024, only 78% of all models across its entire product line natively allow VPN setup, and the remaining 22% of the beginner models (such as VS-100/200) don’t support OpenVPN or IPsec protocols as hardware doesn’t support them. VPN-supported high-end models (such as VS-500Pro) are driven by a quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 processor (with a main frequency of 2.4GHz) and 1GB DDR4 memory, supporting up to 650Mbps in VPN throughput. The low-end MT7628 chip (with a main frequency of 580MHz), on the other hand, can only have a maximum bandwidth of 50Mbps. This lowered the rate of establishing the VPN connection dramatically from 97% to 32%. As an example, when the VS-200 model purchased by a specific enterprise attempted to use the L2TP protocol, the rate of system crash was 1.3 per hour due to the insufficient amount of memory.
Hardware specs and firmware versions are explicitly compatible. vsee boxes that are VPN-compatible should have firmware V2.3 or later, and flash memory capacity ≥128MB (the low-end model has only 64MB). A user survey in 2023 showed that 38% of older devices lost their VPN capability because they could not be upgraded with a higher version of firmware. For instance, only 12% of consumers of VS-150 (released in 2019) were able to install third-party VPN clients successfully, and the mean latency went up to 420ms from 80ms. The firm disclosed that R&D cost to introduce VPN support to the entry-level product was as high as 8.7 per unit, and the price of this series was only 49, resulting in a lack of business viability.
Market segmentation approaches affect functional coverage. The “commercial version” of vsee boxes (65%) natively supports both IPsec and WireGuard protocols in their entirety, while the “Home Basic version” (35%) simply opens up old protocols such as PPTP (7%), and the encryption level is limited to 128 bits. Third-party tests performed in 2024 found that the transmission bit error rate of VPN for the VS-300 commercial model was as low as 0.003%, CPU loading of the VS-50 home model rose to 98% with AES-256 encryption, and the packet loss rate rose to 15%. For example, when a remote access user attempted to establish an OpenVPN connection with VS-50, the system reset due to CPU overheating (up to 82°C), and the mean available time dropped from the nominal 24/7 to 4.2 hours.
The customers are able to unlock some features with paid upgrades. In 2023, the company introduced the “VPN Enhancement Package” (at $29 per year per device), with restricted VPN capability on 17% of budget models (e.g., limiting 3 simultaneous tunnels). Performance tests reveal that the IPsec throughpute on the enhanced VS-200 model is 23Mbps, a mere 3.5% of the high-end model. The US government’s cybersecurity organization NIST has warned that such compromise measures would reduce the encryption level from 256 bits to 128 bits, increasing the risk of data leakage by 4.8 times.
Decentralization is driven by industry forces. As demand for remote work increased 23% worldwide in 2024, vsee boxes publicly announced the launch of the new VS-400 series (starting at $129), which will be pre-installed with VPN support, and the supported protocols will increase from 6 to 12 (like Tailscale and ZeroTier). This move reduced the procurement cost for business users by 41%, but the obsolescence rate of the previous equipment is expected to reach 58% by 2025. This tri-layer strategy of “performance classification – paid upgrade – hardware iteration” is redefining the VPN support horizon of network devices.