Private Internet Access VPN provider review

Private Internet Access

Private Internet Access (PIA) promises the protection of your privacy via VPN. If this provider can stand by its promises will be shown in this review.

Speed

PIA provided good speeds in my test. I could user my 100mbit/s connection with nearly 100%:

Without VPN

With Private Internet Access (NL)

The latency to the google DNS Server was even better with VPN. The loss in speed can be explained by the encryption overhead.

Torrent and P2P speed

Torrenting was good on a server in Switzerland:

AT my first test I had slow speed issues in German and Dutch servers (just got 2MB/s):

In the forum of Private Internet Access I could find a solution: uTorrent was the problem and not the VPN. After the fix I got good speeds also on the German and Dutch servers:

Features

This is a list of features offered by Private Internet Access

• OpenVPN
• IPSec
• own Software
• Killswitch
• Leak protection
• Adblocker
• TCP / 443
• Port Forwarding
• encryption can be chosen
• 3272 servers at 37 locations in 25 countries

The important points are bold.

Nevertheless: there is one missing feature: PIA does not offer an effective protection against Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). With DPI it is possible to detect VPN traffic and throttle or block it. This is used by countries like Iran, China, UAE, Turkey and Russia. If you want use a VPN in one of these countries you need an SSL or SSH tunnel to mask your VPN traffic. Private Internet Access does not offer such a tunnel.

Security

One major point for VPNs is the security. PIA can score in this category:

• no IP logs
• no IP leak
• OpenVPN
• good encryption

The level of encryption can be managed in the windows client:

Support

You can access a knowledgebase, a useful forum and you can contact the support via mail. I opened up a ticket and it was answered the next day.

Prices

In my opinion the prices are cheap compared to the features offered by Private Internet Access.

Review Video