How Smart routing keeps local sites direct
Smart routing is a split, and it is on unless you turn it off. Sites in mainland China go out through your ordinary network and are not detoured. Traffic headed overseas goes through the tunnel. The point is to stop punishing local sites for a tunnel they do not need. It is not a claim that local traffic is hidden. Direct means your network sees it, the same as with the VPN off.
A detour is a cost, even when the tunnel is healthy
Every packet you send through a VPN travels to an exit and then to the site. That extra distance is fine when the site is overseas and the direct path is the one you do not want. It is a tax when the site is a local bank, a map, a transit card, or a video service that lives in the same country you do. Those sites are often built to expect a nearby address. Send them across an ocean and back, and they get slower, or they refuse the session, or they offer you a version of themselves meant for somewhere else.
The tunnel can be empty and the detour still hurts. Capacity at 8 p.m. is a separate problem, described in why a VPN is slow at 8 p.m. Routing is the question of which packets are allowed to skip that problem entirely. A local site on the direct path does not wait behind anyone’s evening. It also does not enjoy the tunnel’s privacy. Both sentences are the feature.
What “direct” commits you to
Direct is the path your device would have used with no VPN at all. Your router, your ISP, the hotel, the campus network: whoever already carries your traffic carries this traffic too. They can see the same kind of destination information they could see before you installed anything. Kovalink’s exit does not see it, because the packet never arrives there to be forwarded.
That is the trade, and it is not a footnote. People turn a VPN on because they want a single story: everything leaves through the exit. Smart routing refuses that story for mainland China sites, on purpose, because the single story makes ordinary local life worse. If you are on a network you do not trust and you want the single story anyway, you do not argue with the feature. You switch it off. The place is Settings, then Routing, then Global. Global is the other position of that control, the one you choose when you do not want the direct exception.
We are not going to invent a diagram of how a site is judged to be in mainland China. The behavior you can hold the product to is the one you can see: with Smart routing on, a mainland site behaves as it does when you are disconnected, and an overseas site behaves as it does only while you are connected.
How to check it in one sitting
- Connect, and leave Smart routing on. Open a site you know is in mainland China. Then disconnect and open it again. The two visits should feel like the same network. If the connected visit is the slow or broken one, the site is being detoured and the split is not doing its job for that site.
- Open a site you know is overseas, still connected. It should load through the tunnel. Disconnect, and compare. If the overseas site only behaves while you are connected, it is on the tunneled side of the split.
- Switch to Global and repeat the mainland site. You are looking for the direct exception to disappear. Switch back when you have seen it. Global is a mode, not an upgrade.
Use sites you already understand. A trading screen that must stay reachable is a clean overseas example: TradingView on a stable connection. Community and voice stay in the tunnel too: Discord when it will not finish connecting. A bank or a map in mainland China is a clean local example. Do not use a site that is broken for everyone today. You will learn nothing about routing from an outage.
On the road the split matters in a different way. Hotel and campus networks are unhappy for their own reasons, and a tunnel is often why an overseas site works there at all. Local sites on those networks sometimes work only when they are direct, because the hotel expects a local-looking client. Travel and hotel Wi-Fi is the page for that setting. Smart routing is the default that matches it: overseas through the tunnel, mainland direct.
What the overseas half still owes you
The split does not make the tunneled half magical. Overseas traffic still shares the exit with everyone else who is connected, and the evening can still crowd that exit. Not oversold is the answer to that crowd. It is not hiding inside the routing switch. If an overseas site is slow at 8 p.m. and a mainland site is fine, you have just watched the split work, and the remaining slowness is capacity on the tunneled path.
The split also does not decide battery by itself, but it does stop the phone from hauling local pages through the tunnel for no reason. Fewer detoured bytes is fewer reasons to keep the interface busy. That is a side effect, not the reason the feature exists. The reason is the local site that should have been boring.
What Kovalink ships
Smart routing is on by default. Mainland China sites go direct and are not detoured. Overseas traffic goes through the tunnel. To leave that default, open Settings, then Routing, and switch to Global. Connecting is still one button. Auto selects a server for the traffic that does enter the tunnel, or you select one from the Nodes list, and if the way in fails another is used without a setting for you to mind. The direct path does not need a server. That is the point of leaving it direct.