How's the speed on AirVPN? Mullvad? iVPN?

After reading around a lot about different vpn providers, I've norrowed it down to the often suggested AirVPN or Mullvad (and maybe iVPN). I want a non-U.S. vpn provider, who is very privacy conscious. I wondering what are people's experiences with the speed on these providers?

I have a 15 Mbps connection, am I going to be able to max out that connection or get much slower speeds? I fiddled with the free trial on Mullvad and seemed to only get my max speed sometimes on the German server (and a very slow ping). Strangely the U.S. server was slower. The Netherlands server seemed to almost not work at all. And the Swedish server was okay but relatively slow.

Just wondering what other people's experiences are with these VPNs. Thanks.

 

Give AirVPN a try.
Explain your concern, I am sure they will grant you a 3-days free trial.
Then you can try their speed.

 

I've been using iVPN for quite some time and the speed is excellent. There is no noticeable difference when I use it. Well worth the $100/year price.

 

AirVPN, Mullvad, and bolehvpn all come highly recommended.

http://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-that-take-your-anonymity-seriously-2013-edition-130302/

Good read and tells you about how they operate.

 

From someone who has used them all. AirVPN, I just don't like as its leak protection is poor. Mullvad has the best TCP + UDP overall. iVPN has slightly faster UDP speeds and much slower TCP speeds. iVPN has to have a manual leak fix applied or it will leak.

 

I just want to agree with something Taliscicero said.

If you are new to VPNs do not forget think about TCP vs UDP.
Some VPN companies do not even mention the difference, so if you are not careful you do not know whether you are using TCP or UDP if the company has its own OpenVPN app.
And even for a company that let you choose TCP vs UDP, the speed difference can be very different. UDP can be 2 or 3 x faster than TCP sometimes.

 

Indeed, or in my case OpenVPN may not work well for you over UDP or your ISP may block UDP traffic. I get slow speeds on UDP so use TCP which is why I use Mullvad for general use and iVPN for torrents as my problem is with single thread downloads over UDP. Which is why TCP is important to me.

 

That was one thing I noticed about AirVPN there client seems out of date, no options even... would be lovely to have fix DNS leak and stop if VPN connection drops checkboxes.

Course one can firewall and fix the dns leaks themselves but the options still nice to have.

 

I am a VPN enthusiast. I have taken out two one month subscriptions out for it in the past to test it out. I maybe played around with it for 30 minutes to an hour each time and gave up due to leaks and no support for them other then "please delete your firewall or security product and download C.O.M.O.D.O Firewall as that's the only help we will give you. VPN's should not require you to change other software.

 

If you want security, run your VPN clients in pfSense (VM or hardware). You get routing and firewall protection in FreeBSD's PF.

 

99% of people are not going to do that, I'm obsessive and even I don't do that as for most people its too much hassle. You should have DNS protection & Dedicated DNS server + Disconnection Guard + No Logs, for all VPN's. There is no excuse to not have these now.

 

I have also tried it in the past and while I also saw while they recommend COMODO, they have guides/howto's for multiple firewalls on their forum. I also think it would be nice if they incorporated DNS and connection-drop anti-leak, but it isn't as secure as creating custom firewall rules. Agree with it or not, if they provide antileak features in their client(debatable a false sense of security), the percentage of users securing their VPN connection with a firewall will probably be lower than when they don't provide it at all and only encourage users to configure their firewall. There is something to say for their approach if it leads to more security in the end, even if it is not user-friendly. I do think though they should give a notice or warning when you subscribe that their client doesn't provide anti-leak + why and give a link to a firewall configuration toturial.

 

Not at all true, you can block connection leaks without using firewall options and in fact there are open source scripts to do this very thing. BolehVPN recently added leak protection which I believe is from using that same opensource script. AirVPN not adding it is just lazy. If BolehVPN goes through the trouble to code it in, why can't Airvpn? You can say firewalls are safer, but really they give you a false sense of security more then a script does, how many times have firewalls just shut down for no reason or security software crashing? I know its happened to many people. I would rather a CMD script that is built into windows to physically change the adapter settings so there will be no chance of a leak rather then a firewall which is a soft way of blocking leaks.

 

AirVPN are planning on adding those features in there upcoming client software.

I do agree though it is strange it has taken this long, also to note as said above what if the client software crashed?

I think its a good idea to use a firewall also, so far I have yet to see one drop out or dns leak via my tomato router, but will try to get it firewalled up in case it does drop just not sure how at the moment!

 

I don't know the script you're talking about, but the VPN providers client software and 3rd party software I know work by monitoring the connection/IP/VPN adapter etc and when they detect disconnection they block/terminate network traffic, but there is a tiny time interval between connection loss, detection by the software and blocking in which you can transmit unencrypted data. If you configure a firewall to block all network traffic except traffic through the VPN adapter and only to your VPN's IP then nothing can be leaked.

 

In Linux, adrelanos' -https://github.com/adrelanos/VPN-Firewall does an excellent job. It's a script that creates iptables rules. When the rules are up, everything except the VPN is blocked. And the VPN can reconnect while the rules are up.

 

You won't be disappointed with ivpn.net!

 

Thanks for all the reponses.

I was not aware of the UDP/TCP issue. I'll have to try to learn about that. I don't really know which was connecting with Mullvad, when I was using the free trial. I guess udp is the default?

As far as disconnections and DNS leaks go, I'm using Linux, so I'm probably going to be doing a lot of my own configuration anyway. That seems to be the way it is with Linux and most of these services. Maybe Comodo et al crashes sometimes, I'm not really worried about iptables failing, since it's part of the Linux kernel.

Anyway, returning to the more specific question of my original post, I wondering what sorts of speeds people are seeing with these different services, in mpbs and I guess I'm curious about ping times also.

Thanks.

 

If you have a script to change the adapter to only send to VPN's DNS and set the sub-net to only go through your VPN and block everything else its better then a firewall because it renders your normal internet connection dead while using the VPN.

(To OP): Most VPN company's will be able to give 20MBPS +/10MBPS UP speeds. On your connection it won't make a difference and really the only thing that does is UDP/TCP, UDP is faster but TCP will never lose packets. If you don't suffer any packet-loss on your normal connection your fine to just use UDP always.

 

Isn't this what a firewall does? At least iptables in Linux? Isn't one effectively setting the system to only allow connections to the ip address for the VPN? And since iptables runs at a kernel level, what could be more secure? Or am I misunderstanding something? It also occurs to me, couldn't I just set my router to only allow connections to the ip address for the VPN?

Thanks. I guess on Mullvad I was not seeing speeds like that, except (erratically) on the German server. At least that was during my three hour free trial.

I'm curious if people have more thoughts about iVPN. It seems like they often get mentioned here as being pretty fast. But they are perhaps a less well known service? Not mentioned as often as AirVPN, Mullvad, and BolehVPN. Wondering what people think of iVPN as far as privacy and trustworthiness go.

 

I suspect that it's partly because iVPN costs more than the other three. But it's one of the few (that I know, anyway) that offer two-hop VPN routes. The others are Cryptohippie and Insorg, and they're both about as expensive.

It's also because iVPN actively doesn't promote itself for torrenting, whereas Mullvad and BolehVPN actively do, and AirVPN seems neutral. At least, that's my impression. But hey, I like them all

Here's what they say:

-https://airvpn.org/

-http://bolehvpn.net/services.php

-https://www.mullvad.net/en/

-https://www.ivpn.net/

-https://www.ivpn.net/whyivpn

 

I use iVPN and they are great, I only hold two negatives to them. Not much support "One person", and the lack of a decent client for blocking leaks.

 

Thanks mirimir and Taliscicero. I guess I'll have to start trying them out now.

 

Another pro of Air is that whenever there is a debate with a server owner, in a matter of some hours they shut down that server, to protect their users.

 

hey taliscicero, and other guys too, what is your overall opinion of purevpn?
what's purevpn like, at these departments: speed, reliability, leak protection, multi logins, connection kill when vpm drops, no logs, shared ip, unlimited server & ip switch, server location diversity, multi protocol supprot, no cap, p2p and voip support, etc.

if you know anyother vpn meets these criteria, could you please share it with us?