OPERA’S BUILT-IN VPN – IS IT A SERIOUS CONTENDER?
Whilst all of the VPNs we’ve reviewed here come as separate apps, Opera has baked a VPN into its browser. Although even the use of the phrase VPN is pushing it somewhat.
Whereas all the others here will actually redirect your entire connection, the Opera VPN only deals with traffic going via the browser itself. Open your email client, Slack or another browser, for example, and the traffic will still flow as normal. It’s more of an anonymising web proxy than a VPN in the conventional sense.
Still, if you’re aware of those limitations, Opera will do a job for a short burst of surfing at a public Wi-Fi hotspot, for example. It’s very simple to establish a “VPN” connection, too. Click on the little VPN icon in the address bar, choose your location from the dropdown menu and flick the switch to On.
The choice of locations is not so much helicopter-view as space station: you get to choose from Asia, Americas or Europe, or simply stick with the “optimal” location – presumably the one that delivers the fastest connection.
Still, Opera struggled to land us in the right continent. Firstly, Netflix was having none of our efforts to gain access to its US catalogue via Opera. Despite apparently lodging in the “Americas”, we were still only offered UK content (a later security email revealed Netflix logged our location as Sweden). BBC iPlayer, however, barred us for being “outside of the UK”. Worse still on YouTube, where despite still being in the Americas, we were presented with a Russianlanguage version.
Once set to optimal location, connection speeds absolutely flew – they were indiscernible from our regular fibre connection speeds, on both the up and the downlink. A switch to the Americas dropped download speeds to 11Mbits/sec and uploads to 2Mbits/sec, which is well below par when compared to the paid-for services.
With nothing else in the way of security features and no kill switch if the connection drops, it’s hard to recommend Opera’s built-in service for anything more than an extra layer of security for some Starbucks surfing.