What Is VPN Passthrough? How It Works and When You Need It

If you’ve ever poked around your router’s admin page, you’ve probably seen settings like “PPTP Passthrough,” “IPsec Passthrough” or simply “VPN Passthrough.” Most people only go looking for them after a VPN refuses to connect from home. VPN passthrough is a router feature that lets VPN traffic from a device on your network pass through the router’s network address translation (NAT) to a VPN server on the internet. It exists because some older VPN protocols don’t work well with NAT.