If you’re concerned about your privacy, it’s hard to recommend IPVanish. However, there’s no way to configure different behaviours depending on which network you’re connected to, and no double VPN or multi-hop option to send your traffic through multiple servers in different countries. The Windows client can also automatically engage the VPN whenever you connect to a network that you haven’t marked as trusted. On the plus side, the software includes a killswitch function to instantly shut down all traffic if the secure connection is lost, and you can set it to automatically connect to the VPN when the system starts up. Several other VPNs have set themselves up in more privacy-friendly jurisdictions precisely to avoid this concern. The company promises that it doesn’t store any logs of your activity, but the authorities can legally compel it to hand over whatever information it does have about its customers. That’s because the US is part of the Five Eyes alliance, meaning it shares data with the UK and other countries. IPVanish is based in the USA, and while that might be good for connectivity, it’s not great for privacy. That’s a bit of a shame if you were hoping to use this VPN to keep up with British programming from abroad. Sadly, using the dedicated BritBox and Now TV apps didn’t yield any better results than using the browser on a laptop – evidently these services just don’t get on with IPVanish. It was precisely the same story on Android: again, Disney+ and Netflix happily served up their US libraries, while BBC iPlayer worked perfectly. It also allowed us to watch BBC iPlayer through a UK server, though neither BritBox nor Now TV would let us watch until we disconnected the VPN. While connected to the New York server we were able to use Chrome on a Windows laptop to browse and watch US-only content from both Disney+ and Netflix, although we couldn’t get into Hulu. Since it allows unlimited devices, you could actually use it to watch five or six 4K movies at once, assuming your broadband line was fast enough.Īnd it’s not bad at unblocking US-based streaming services. IPVanish VPN review: Is it good for video streaming?Ĭlearly, IPVanish has enough bandwidth for streaming. It’s also worth mentioning that on both desktop and mobile platforms you can configure split tunnelling to send speed-critical apps over your regular ISP connection, and only use the VPN for ones where privacy or location-spoofing are required. While that’s slower than what we saw on Windows, it’s close to the best speed we’ve seen from an Android VPN (124Mbits/sec by ExpressVPN). The London server gave us a download rate of 191Mbits/sec, while the New York connection hit a very usable 116Mbits/sec. The service was almost as speedy on our Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 Android tablet. We’ve seen a few other VPNs go as high as 190Mbits/sec (namely Hotspot Shield and NordVPN), but this is plenty of bandwidth for most things you’ll want to do online. Without the VPN connected we had been getting download speeds of 213Mbits/sec connecting to an IPVanish server in London barely slowed down our connection at all, giving us 203Mbits/sec.Įven when we switched to a server in New York, speeds held up pretty well, averaging 157Mbits/sec. On a Windows 11 laptop, results were perfectly respectable. To test IPVanish’s performance we installed the software in our own home, which has a 200Mbits/sec Virgin fibre broadband connection, and fired up the Google Speed Test service. Using a VPN always has some impact on your connection speed. You really couldn’t ask for more control from a VPN. You can pick your favourite servers with a tap, and if you switch from a list of countries to cities you can once again check the ping times and loads of individual servers. The front page opens with a map – though you can’t scroll and browse this one, like you can on the Windows client – and the complete server list is available via an icon at the bottom. Servers can be conveniently marked as favourites too, and you can connect on any of five VPN protocols, including WireGuard, IKEv2 and, unusually, SSTP, which is comparatively slow but good at getting through firewalls. You can also sort and search the full list of servers by country, city, ping time and load, and even browse the individual servers in each location. You can pick a server by clicking on the map, or the program can automatically select the fastest server. It’s a definite improvement, and we like the easy-access killswitch control, but we wouldn’t have minded a more compact presentation. The Windows client used to open with a busy-looking page filled with network speeds and stats now the front end is mostly filled by a live graph of network activity and map view of your server location. Since we last tested IPVanish in 2021, the interface has been overhauled. IPVanish VPN review: What’s it like to use?
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