A Month with AirVPN

I’ve been using AirVPN for a little over a month on various devices both at home and while traveling, so I now feel reasonably prepared to give some opinions on it. My main point of comparison is to Mullvad, which was my previous provider that I chose not to renew with (after it came to light that one of the founders funds extremists in Europe).

Signup and Price

Even though I commit the sin of paying for this stuff with a credit card I still don’t like VPN services that require you to register with an email address. Mullvad doesn’t ask for an email at all. AirVPN “requires” one but also tells you straight up that you can enter a bogus one. Good enough!

In terms of price, Mullvad charges a flat rate of 5€ per month. AirVPN costs the same amount if service is purchased in a three month block. Shorter blocks cost more, longer blocks cost less. This is also good enough.

Server Locations

Informally scrolling through the server list AirVPN seems to have servers in fewer countries than Mullvad. I find it good enough for my needs. Depending on your objectives it may or may not meet yours. Coverage of North America and Europe is best. Asia and Oceania coverage is okay. South America has one server in Sao Paulo. Africa and the Middle East have zero servers.

Clients

So far I’ve used both the Android and Linux desktop apps (that are named “Eddie” for some reason). They are significantly less friendly and easy to use than the Mullvad apps, and the Linux app is even written with .NET which was a, uh, surprise. In exchange for all this, though, they do offer more technical information and settings than the Mullvad apps did. As an example I appreciate that the AirVPN UI will give you server latency and remaining throughput in an info dense table reminiscent of old Win32 programs.

Finally, as one would hope, AirVPN will generate you WireGuard and/or OpenVPN configs if you want them. So if you don’t like their retro feeling apps you can just use some other client.

Speeds

I take it as a fact of life that load balancing throughput as a VPN provider is tricky. Routinely I would have long-lived Mullvad connections where I stepped away and come back hours later to find that the speeds were degraded. I still have this issue with AirVPN, and anecdotally it feels like I do run into it more frequently than I did with Mullvad. The blunt solution of disconnecting and reconnecting with a re-ranked server list always fixes it. It is what it is.

(That said, if any networking experts have suggestions here let me know!)

Port Forwarding

Mullvad discontinued their support for port forwarding a while ago. AirVPN stubbornly still offers it! Furthermore they even let you specify the specific port numbers to forward (up to 5) instead of doing random assignment. It’s a nice bonus for sure that they support this even though it was not a hard requirement when I was VPN shopping.

Streaming Video

I’m not a big streaming video person, so even though I used AirVPN while in Asia I did not get to test it with any of the major streaming apps. That said, Mullvad was generally terrible for this as the blocklists of all the big streaming apps seemed very accurate regarding Mullvad IP addresses. I can’t imagine that AirVPN would be any worse!