ExpressVPN
Slowing speeds and internal drama make this pricy industry stalwart less of a solid bet than it used to be
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PRICE £10 per month or £74 per year, from expressvpn.com
ExpressVPN is an old favourite that’s recently undergone some major upheavals. Many are to its benefit, with easy-to-use desktop apps on macOS and Windows, while Linux users get a similarly pleasant command-line utility. The company also provides instructions to help you manually set up your VPN connection on routers and other devices.
Features include automatic obfuscation on some servers, notably the Hong Kong endpoint, though we’d prefer better marked obfuscation modes. 94 endpoint countries are on offer, entirely using RAMdisk servers. You also get a kill switch, split tunnelling and some proxy plugins for your web browser of choice.
The clients default to ExpressVPN’s own open-source Lightway protocol, which performs comparably to OpenVPN, edging towards being a little faster over long distances, such as connecting our UK test system to an endpoint in New York.
It’s fairly fast: we got above average download speeds of 318Mbits/sec and 250Mbits/sec from the Netherlands and US respectively. UK speeds were below average but quick enough at 168Mbits/sec. Although ExpressVPN was once the most reliable service for international video streaming fans, we couldn’t watch US Netflix, Disney+ or even BBC iPlayer when using a UK endpoint.
Then there’s the controversy. In September 2021, CIO and former US intelligence officer Dan Gericke was fined following an FBI investigation into his mercenary activities spying on human rights activists and journalists for the UAE. Separately, ExpressVPN was purchased by British company Kape Technologies, which owns a number of other VPN firms.
There are obvious ethical and potential trust implications of both Gericke’s activities and Kape’s previous incarnation as Crossrider, developer of an API with cross-site scripting capabilities that became associated with adware developers who used it to inject unwanted ads into web pages. However, these don’t have any direct implications for the quality of ExpressVPN’s service.
We know ExpressVPN’s security measures resisted server seizure by Turkish authorities under its previous ownership without revealing any user data. However, as it’s now under new ownership, no matter how hands-off we’re assured that Kape will be, we’re back to treating ExpressVPN’s audited no-logging policy as untested.
Its high price and poor streaming performance make ExpressVPN hard to recommend right now.