Pia Vpn Review – It may not be for everyone, but PIA is a quick and hassle-free solution to location spoofing and streaming.
PIA is a VPN service that keeps all your online activity private – so even your ISP can’t track what sites you visit and what files you download. Like all VPNs, it encrypts your internet traffic and routes it through one of the company’s secure servers.
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These servers are spread across 74 different countries, which means you can use a VPN to hide your location. By choosing a server in, say, the US, you can access video streaming sites and other services that are usually blocked in the UK. Although not legal in your home country, you can use your virtual presence to share and download files via BitTorrent, although note that PIA does not explicitly support file sharing.
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The monthly service costs £8.09, which is about the same as most competing VPNs. As usual, signing up for the whole year is more cost effective, in this case £32.49, which equates to £2.71 per month. There are also regular special offers: at the time of writing you can sign up for three years and three months free for £65, which works out to £1.67 a month. If you’re serious about protecting your anonymity, you can pay with a gift card or cryptocurrency so you never have to share your bank details with PIA.
One subscription allows you to use the VPN on up to ten devices at the same time. All popular desktop and mobile platforms are supported, and PIA gets bonus marks for offering a decent graphical client for Linux systems – most VPNs only offer command-line tools. You can also install a VPN on a suitable router to protect all traffic from any number of connected devices, while using a smart DNS service to hide your location when using a game console, smart TV or set-top box.
The company claims that its online support service is available 24/7 if you have any problems setting up and using the service; When we tried the live chat feature offline, we had to fill out an online form and wait hours for a response.
If you’re still not satisfied for any reason, you can apply our 30-day money-back guarantee. You can try PIA for seven days before you buy, which is quite unusual for a VPN service – although the trial only covers Android and iOS devices.
Private Internet Access Review: A Great Vpn At A Great Price
We had no problems downloading the PIA client app from the provider’s website and setting it up on Windows 11. Once installed, it hides in your system tray most of the time and when clicked, a small rectangular window will open. Here, a large round button allows you to connect and disconnect the VPN, and you can also see the details of the connected server.
Clicking on the fly-out arrow will display a list of available servers. You can type to search for a location or sort the list by name or latency, the latter of which provides important insight into the speed of that particular server.
You can also expand the interface to a full-height bar with quick connect buttons for your favorite servers, a performance graph, and easy access to options like desktop notifications and port forwarding. It may sound complicated, but you can close or relocate different modules – you don’t actually need to use them every day. In fact, you can configure the VPN to automatically connect at startup or system startup and never have to interact with the software.
The Android app has a similar design, with a main screen that scrolls up and down to display various controls and information. You can again customize the order and visibility of different panels and configure automatic connection to protect you without opening the app.
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All VPNs slow down your connection to some degree, but overall PIA worked best for us. We tested the service on our Windows 11 laptop with a Virgin Media Fiber internet connection. Before activating the VPN, we measured a download speed of 214 Mbits/s using Google’s speed test tool; When we connected to a server in London, that speed dropped to just 200 Mbits per second – a practically significant slowdown.
When we moved to a server in New York, the speed dropped to 142Mbits/sec. That’s slightly below scores of 170 Mbps we’ve seen from other VPNs, and well below NordVPN’s amazing 196 Mbps. But we’re not complaining—there’s more bandwidth than you need for streaming video or browsing the web.
We performed the same tests on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 tablet. The performance of the London server is very similar, with a maximum download speed of 198 Mbit/s. However, when connecting to New York, things were much slower, with download speeds dropping to 64 Mbits per second. That’s still OK for online video, but most other VPNs managed 100Mbps or more in this test.
However, both the desktop and mobile apps support split tunneling, so you can send only certain apps through the VPN while the rest go through your ISP’s servers at full speed. Another great feature is that you can tap or click a handy button to temporarily snooze the VPN for a preset amount of time, after which it will automatically turn back on.
Private Internet Access Review 2022: Fast, Secure & Cheap Vpn
For high-quality 4K video, the recommended download speed is 25 Mbps, and PIA easily exceeds this. You can even watch multiple 4K videos simultaneously on different devices.
In terms of content, we found that running PIA on our Windows laptop allowed us to access all the major US streaming services: Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu happily served their region-locked content libraries. One exception was Amazon Prime, but video access is tied to the address registered to your Prime account, so no VPN can help with that.
Unfortunately, after switching to a UK-based server, we discovered that we couldn’t access any of the UK-based streaming services – not BBC iPlayer, BritBox or Now TV. Still, PIA might not be the ideal choice for vacationers who want to keep their favorite shows.
We haven’t had much success trying streaming on Android either. Even with our virtual location set to the US, the local Netflix and Disney+ apps still only offer UK content, while Hulu won’t let us. One consolation was that BBC iPlayer worked on the tablet – while Britbox and Now TV stubbornly refused to play along.
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PIA promises not to keep any logs of your online activity and the app is built with security in mind. On Windows and Android, you can create fairly sophisticated rules to turn VPN on or off for specific wireless or cellular networks; In the desktop client, you can also specify certain IP addresses that should always be accessed via the VPN, which is a cool feature found in some other VPNs.
On desktop, the multi-hop routing option makes it difficult to track your location, and all PIA apps offer a kill switch that turns off internet activity when you disconnect from the VPN, ensuring nothing is accidentally exposed.
There is only one thing that makes us hesitate about PIA: it is based in the United States, which is part of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance. This means that US agencies could theoretically obtain all the information PIA holds on you and share it with British authorities. For peace of mind, you can choose a VPN based in a more neutral location, such as NordVPN in Panama or ExpressVPN in the British Virgin Islands.
PIA may not be for everyone. Performance, especially on Android, is slightly below par, and the fact that the company is under US jurisdiction means it shouldn’t be your first choice if anonymity is critical to you.
Private Internet Access Vpn Review
However, if you want day-to-day privacy and hassle-free location spoofing, PIA is a good choice with a robust feature set and several outstanding features, including a user-friendly interface for Linux users. The price is reasonable (especially if you can do a long-term deal) and the ten-device allowance is attractive. We are committed to unbiased sharing. Some of the links on our site come from our partners who compensate us. Please read our disclosure policy for more information.
Private Internet Access is the thirteenth VPN we’ve reviewed on this site, and it’s worth considering if you’re looking for a VPN service that ticks most of the right boxes. While it won’t topple the dominance of our current top three, the all-purpose NordVPN, the user-friendly ExpressVPN, or the speed-builder Hotspot Shield, it’s a well-priced contender that supports many simultaneous connections and delivers excellent connection speeds.
We’re currently revisiting and updating our VPN, but below is our current pick of the best VPN services we pay the most for.
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