AirVPN customer review

VPN
1

So I started testing AirVPN after reading through a lot of fake reviews from all these sponsored affiliates and also a few real reviews here on reddit and ThatOnePrivacyGuy’s page.
Also important to mention I am NOT a sponsored affiliate troll haha

AirVPN seemed the most legitimate and sincere service from how they presented themselves and what ThatOnePrivacyGuy’s chart revealed, so I decided to test them out.

First I contacted them for a 3 days test period. It took them about 3 -4 days to answer to my request by e-mail. I used their contact formular on their webpage. Don’t know how fast this is compared to the standard in the industry, but it could have been faster if you are trying to please new customers. :wink:

They sent me a coupon code for 3 days that I could use to get the 3 days option for free. Worked perfectly.

After that I downloaded their client from their page. It seems like for Windows 7 there’s only a client from last year (August 2015), that’s a bit disappointing, but ok, I’m not expecting anybody to support every old OS.

While installing I noticed that their program is not digitally signed at Microsoft. That’s a no-go for every security software.

Using AirVPN Windows client

Client starts up fast and connects quickly to a server that you can decide on your own after logging in.
Here you can also decide whether you want to use network lock or not (forcing all internet connections to go through AirVPN and when you’re disconnected from AirVPN servers by chance no traffic will leak through, as far as I understood it. Not quite like a Kill Switch, but still better than nothing).

After logging in you can also check if there are better servers (better latency or less load) and reconnect to one of those.

I usually connect to dutch servers as I live in Germany and they’re the fastest for me here and music videos are not blocked on youtube in Netherlands (f*ck GEMA btw, Germans will know what I’m talking about).

Allowed simultanous connections

3 simultanous connections are allowed. You can look up in your profile on their page what devices are using a connection at the moment and disconnect them if necessary.

Download Speed

Normally my connection allows me to download about 1200 kB/s, with AirVPN I get about 900 kB/s max, somehow it still gets cut down even though their servers should be able to enable much faster speeds. I guess the VPN technology still slows down the downloading speed a bit. The loss of about 300 kB/s are not that important for me though.
EDIT: Found some servers that gave me 100% download/upload speed as without VPN.

I did some testing on speedtest.com but the results are not telling me that much.

This is my result with VPN enabled:

with VPN

This is the speedtest without VPN:

without VPN

Looks like much difference but in reality it’s not. Just about the 300 kB/s difference that I told you.

I usually download stuff from zippyshare or mega so the difference that I noticed is compared to those speeds from where when using to download it with those hosters.

Torrenting

IP is not leaking as tested here with checkmytorrentip.torrent

TorrentIP check

As you can see the Server IP is transmitted to others instead of your own. Speeds are pretty much the same as downloads, so no throttling or filtering of bandwith, just as they state on their page.

Watching Videos

I can watch live streams (youtube, twitch and co) and videos perfectly without dropouts, even on HD (720p and 1080p).

Websites that block VPN/annoying Cloudflare captchas

There are indeed a few websites that have Cloudflare protection. When accessing them, once in a while you have to solve captcha puzzles. But I only had to solve them the first time I accessed.
In detail it was wuxiaworld.com (chinese webnovel page) and anilinkz.com
I guess cookies or something else did the rest.
Some complained about twitch or some other pages blocked them, I couldn’t notice that.

Mobile Usage

When using AirVPN with mobile phones you have to use 3rd party applications. AirVPN lists OpenVPN for Android, OpenVPN Client for Android or OpenVPN Connect as working apps. All of them can be downloaded at the Google Playstore.

They actively recommend OpenVPN for Android as it is open source contrary to the other two that are closed source.

I tested OpenVPN for Android and OpenVPN Connect. You have to download every profile for each server/country, in order to connect to them (ovpn file).
For every app there is a manual on their page/forum, BUT:
Their manual is not completely right. As I tested the manual step by step they said that we should choose choose Linux as the platform in the Config Generator.
I did that and always got kicked out of the server after 1 minute.
So I tried downloading the ovpn for android contrary to the manual and see there it worked like a charm.

So both of them work while OpenVPN Connect is more laborious, as you have to open each profile (ovpn file) again every time.

OpenVPN for Android just saves every profile in its menu/program and you can choose from that.

Security checks / IP leaks?

There are no IP leaks on Win 7 and with every browser that I got on my laptop. WebRTC doesn’t leak anything too.

Tested with ipleak.net and various other pages:

ipleak Test

Problems encountered

*After exiting the program the connection often doesn’t reset correctly. Means you still have no connection (somehow the network lock isn’t always deactivated, even when closing the program correctly)

If someone encounters that problem, this helps (resetting the connected network adapter):

*Start cmd as admin

*Type in

netsh interface show interface

*See what network adapter is used to connect you to the internet

*Type in the following line with your network adapter name in between the quotation marks “”

netsh interface IPv4 set dnsserver “your_network_adapter_name” dhcp

*Now your network adapter is reset and your connection should work.

Another problem that I encountered is

*When returning from sleep mode AirVPN can’t connect to any server. You have to restart the program to make it work again.

Payment

I bought 3 months with Paypal after a 3 days free trial. No complications there. Everything was unlocked right away.
Also you are not forced to make a subscription payment like some other VPN services…
I tried to buy Private Internet Access with Paypal and they (or Paypal, I still don’t know who was responsible for this) actually didn’t allow to pay with Paypal without having credit card information stored in your Paypal account (strange thing, never happened before with any page…).

There are several other payment options avaible including bitcoin and bank transfer and so on.

Conclusion

For my purposes AirVPN is a totally satisfying VPN service, their client could be a bit better, but all in all it does its job fine. I didn’t have much contact with the customer support, but 3-4 days reaction time for a new potential customer is quite slow.

Short Pro/contra:

Pro

*Relatively cheap 5~7 € depending on the plan that you choose (I recommend using the trial phase and a short plan to test first and then choose a longer deal)

*No filtering/throttling of a certain data type

*P2P aka torrenting is allowed

*There are no known cases where customer data were given to public authorities unlike hidemyass and some other jokes

*No dropouts on their servers with low loads

*Low ping (I got 42 on their dutch servers) and low load Server Load and Ping

*Many servers across the world (you can actually also check them here even as a non-member; the numbers are accurate, I tested them too. AirVPN Servers)

*Easy and intuitive application on Windows

Contra

*Somehow slow customer support

*Old application for Win7 (Win10 has had a recent update on 14th July -currently 12th September as I’m writing-)

*Windows 7 application has a few bugs that I already mentioned

*No digital signature at Microsoft

Hope I could help you deciding if this VPN service is something for you or not. If you still have questions feel free to post them here, I’ll try to check from time to time, but I’m not a very active reddit member so it might take some time for an answer.
Everything I posted here is to the best of my knowledge and I apologize if there are some mistakes.
Thanks for reading all up until this point :wink:

Best Regards,
Kahzel

2

Why does a digital signature matter, and what kind of non-microsoft software requires a Microsoft code signing in particular?

Anybody can get a code signing certificate for $70. That isn’t the point. It doesn’t make your code more trustworthy.

As we’ve seen in cases like Stuxnet, access to critical code signing certificates that are widely trusted and legitimate are far from hard to obtain by state actors, and non-state actors can purchase illegitimate code signing from the black market – re: shell companies and via fake documents.

3

Thanks for contributing

4

Not quite like a Kill Switch, but still better than nothing

Just to clear things up: The Network Lock from AirVPN is actually superior to the classic Kill Switch other providers have, because it is proactive and not reactive. It actually prevents network packets to leave your computer outside of the VPN tunnel. The classic Kill Switch will only close certain programs in case it detects that the VPN connection was closed. So everything that happens between the VPN connection closing and the Kill Switch detecting it, might leave your computer through your normal internet connection.

EDIT: Still a nice and honest review. Two thumbs up!

5

Im a current AirVPN user.

The problem that you describe its because when you use the AirVPN client and the client its closed suddenly (For example, if you restart your pc without closing the client) it leaves a DNS entry on your network adapter.

When the computer goes back online you cant browse because your adapter now its pointing to an unreachable DNS server. A DNS server that you can only see when you’re in the VPN.

I will leave airvpn as soon as my membership expires. They have top notch features but their servers have a weird problem: Sometimes you’re connected to the server, but the server suddenly stops routing traffic to the internet. Then, you end in a situation where you’re connected to the VPN (Because the server doesnt drop its connection with you) but your traffic cant reach the internet.

It happened today. Look at here:
https://s14.postimg.org/6q2bq64wh/Air_VPN.png

Its V E R Y annoying when it happens, mainly because its my router who its connected to the VPN so when this happens i need to go to my router’s settings and change the server. Very annoying!

Also sometimes my speeds get really low (Its not lack of power on my side. I have a server who its the one doing the routing)

Hope it helps.

6

Maybe you want to try out the new beta version of the “Eddie” client. It is completely rewritten and adds a lot more features. You can find it in the “Experimental” section in the download area.

7

Im going to give this a shot because they allow port forwarding up to 20 ports. I currently use pia and they only allow 1 port and its a hassle to setup. Im going to be running this on my pfsense vm allowing my nas to be able to port forward for plex and torrenting.

8

I don’t really know what you have to do in order to get the code signing, but it will look better and more secure to people if it’s signed.

9

It does not matter at all. Like you said, the code inside is the same and in case of AirVPN the download is secured with HTTPS. But it gives the not so knowledgeable user the peace of conscience that what he is installing is not tampered with.

10

Code signing doesn’t make code legitimate. A virus or malware can still be code signed. It doesn’t provide for any notion of security, it only serves to verify that a specific piece of code was written by the alleged author. If I wanted to make a virus appear more legitimate, I’d have it code signed with a Panamanian Shell Corporation’s code signing certificate. If I wrote a virus and the signature said it was written by XYZ Corp, would it be any more legitimate? Do you trust XYZ over Google or is it more or less the same?

I’m also going to say: AirVPN didn’t write the OpenVPN TAP adapter that’s almost universally prevalent amongst other VPN software clients. OpenVPN did, and if you can’t trust the AirVPN client, I doubt you could trust any other OpenVPN software implementation and clients from Cisco and other major corporations.

In a perfect world, if Adobe wanted to prove that the code in Adobe Flash Player was written by Adobe, they would codesign. Microsoft and Adobe doesn’t code sign for AirVPN or other technology companies. We don’t live in a perfect world – AirVPN would only be code signed by Microsoft if the developers (or OpenVPN’s developers) hacked into Microsoft’s code signing server. That very act is concerning.

The notion that code signing provides any sort of real protection for users is bullshit: it serves to verify that this particular piece of code was written by this particular developer in extremely ideal situations.

Your logic that code signing reassures the user also sets an extremely concerning precedent – the average user is vulnerable to these social engineering attacks. Misinformed, uneducated individuals and plain stupid people are very likely to fall for these attacks.