Ideally, a VPN should offer you good security as well as more than decent performance. You shouldn’t be forced to sacrifice any of the two for the other.
Granted, you should always know that a drop in speed is inevitable when it comes to VPNs, regardless of their quality. However, the lesser the difference is the better your overall experience.
With ibVPN, the server and browsing speeds are extremely fluctuating, and not in a good way.
Tests for the EU servers started off with acceptable results. There was only a 20-30% drop in speed.
From a benchmark of 97 Mbps, the resulting download speed dropped to 64.66 Mbps, a speed that’ll let you have a very good browsing and streaming experience.
Things start falling apart when we tested the US servers. The differences were over 70-80%.
Here’s what we found when testing a New York server:
- Ping: 147ms
- Download speed: 15.70 Mbps (84% slower than the 97 Mbps benchmark)
- Upload speed: 13.44 Mbps (75% slower than the 53 Mbps benchmark)
These are definitely not the worst results we’ve seen, and there’s a lot of potential for better, but for now, the speed on the US servers is very bad. They need to do something about this or they’ll start losing clients. Fast.
The good news is that 35 out of the 180 servers support torrenting. This comes as a breath of fresh air because not all VPNs actively support the P2P file-sharing protocol.
While not all files you download off the internet are illegal or break the copyright agreements, some of them are, and it’s good to keep your anonymity intact with a good VPN.
ibVPN goes one step further and makes it so that you can set up the client to automatically connect to torrenting servers every time you use their service.
These are the server locations that support torrenting:
- The Netherlands
- Luxembourg
- Canada
- Bulgaria
- Hong Kong
- Lithuania
- Russia
- Sweden
To sweeten the pot, out of five servers tested, two of them were able to connect to Netflix. Miami and New York, respectively, were able to immediately access the Netflix website as soon as we fired it up.
Chicago, Canada, and the Netherlands… not so much. All of them failed. But having two servers capable of running Netflix is already astounding, considering that the number of VPNs who can do that can be counted on two hands.