The present invention generally relates to the acceleration of customer premises equipment based virtual private networks (CPE-VPN). To provide virtual private network service from an enterprise network to a mobile client in a secure manner apparatus and method are provided whereby VPN service is provided which allows the wireless network to use data acceleration techniques. This is accomplished by providing a VPN acceleration server that terminates VPN tunnel from the enterprise network, accelerates the data for wireless transmission then encrypts the data for transmission to the mobile client (VPN acceleration client) over an encrypted acceleration tunnel. The encrypted acceleration tunnel may use PKI encryption.