Since ExpressVPN is such a large provider, the service has more servers available than smaller providers. This is why you should choose a provider that has servers close to you. The closer you are to the server, the less likely you are to notice this lag. In our experience, we were only losing a couple of megabits and our speed wasn’t significantly impacted.Īnecdotally, we noticed a slight delay in web requests which is something often seen when using a VPN. It’s hard to predict how these results would translate to the much-faster 100Mb connection we were using only a few months ago. OpenVPN performance was very similar, though we saw greater variety in results compared with the Lightway protocol. While connected to ExpressVPN via Lightway UDP, that dropped to around 8.2Mb/sec with a ping of 26. Without a VPN, we were hitting just under 9.9Mb/sec, with a ping of about 25ms. The nearest server was located around an hour’s drive away in Brisbane. This review was conducted on a rather slow 10Mb connection in semi-rural Queensland, Australia. How far away you are from the network can make a huge difference to your speed, as can network congestion in your neighborhood, what other devices on your network are doing, and whether your ISP is delivering your promised speeds. It’s hard to decisively say how well a VPN performs when there are so many variables involved.
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Unfortunately, the Mac app doesn’t report which protocol has been chosen when you pick the “Automatic” option. The service supports a range of protocols, including Lightway UDP and TCP options, as well as OpenVPN UDP and TCP, and IKEv2. This decides which VPN protocol to use based on your network settings. Connecting to a server on the other side of the world took around 10 seconds on a modest 10Mb connection, with the ability to save a list of favorites or see a list of “Recent” servers in the VPN Locations window.īy default, ExpressVPN will use an “Automatic” configuration. One tap (or a click) and a connection was made almost instantly, which disabled iCloud Private Relay on both devices.Ĭonnecting to another server of your choice is also easy, and you can filter by country or city on both platforms. The ExpressVPN client managed to detect the nearest server on both platforms using its “smart location” feature, which happened to be about 50 miles (80 kilometers) away. RELATED: What Is Apple's Private Relay, and Is a VPN Better? A common design language means you won’t need to learn to use more than one interface, and the overall design is uncluttered and simple.
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Once you’ve logged in, it’s a simple matter of approving the app to install profiles on either platform via a security prompt, after which you are presented with a connection window.īoth the mobile and desktop apps look and behave very similarly, which makes it easy to know what you’re doing.
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PKG file for Mac and the ExpressVPN app from the App Store on an iPhone.