Hiya.

What vpn would be best for me to use on my Vodafone Gigacube to get round the strict Nat type.

Ah the joys of carrier grade NAT. Pretty much any of them, the issue is likely to be the routers ability to run the VPN at a speed you find usable. As your interest is not strictly privacy focused, you could always run your own - a remote VPS for example.
 
Hiya.

What vpn would be best for me to use on my Vodafone Gigacube to get round the strict Nat type.

As Avalon says you could set up your own. An easy (ready-made) commercial option is AzireVPN. They're Swedish based, extremely privacy focused (RAM instances only, custom in-house hardware with ports physically sealed and broken to prevent unauthorised connection etc), and they have the option to download an OpenVPN config file with a dedicated public IPv4 address.

In other words, you can select 'UK' as the server, then 'Public' for the connection type, and voila - you have a dedicated public IP with full net access and all ports open to you. Just remember to make sure your firewall covers the interface if you go this route, whichever provider or method you end up with. Also be aware that unless you run this on beefy dedicated hardware (i.e. not a plastic consumer 'router') you'll have fairly low speeds.
 
Looking for a VPN. Mostly for downloading torrents of Linux distros and Foreign streaming service access like Netflix and Prime which isnt even available in Sweden yet. Also BBC Iplayer and other Uk TV services.

have a 250/250 connection and would like to retain as much as humanly possible.

Looking for a 3 year deal, (is that long sensible?) so a company that will hopefully be around for a while....

Top 3 options?

NordVPN comes to mind but only because i see it spammed everywhere! surely not a great thing?

many thanks.

Did you go with Nord in the end? If so, how have they performed?
 
I use NordVPN and Torguard - switched to TG's streaming package last December. TG is marginally fiddlier to set up for streaming use, they assign static IPs and if they ever start being blocked they say they'll issue new IPs. Nord do some clever tricks with routing of traffic to certain services via different IP ranges (masquerading as from a different AS from what I can tell) to hide the VPN usage. Speeds of both are what you'd expect for VPN connection.

I'd say Nord wins for ease of use - just connect and make sure you pay attention to their site for occasional updates to the "use these servers for streaming from a specific region service" pages. Nord has more servers everywhere.

TG is nice because once you have a streaming IP profile set up in the app, you can just connect and crack on. They also support Wireguard and more protocols than Nord do now.

TG's arguably smaller userbase means you're hopefully less likely have service interrupted if the streaming services crack down on VPN access. Of course with both you can use your own VPN clients. I've found customer service from TG to be pretty prompt and helpful. Nord suffer I think from the sheer volume of users meaning their support reps are always busy, so you don't always initially get very helpful responses.

Just my experiences, YMMV...
 
Did you go with Nord in the end? If so, how have they performed?

Hi,

I ended up with 2 years with Surfshark.
They kept popping up in comparison reviews and when I checked them their price was by far the best just now.

They seem "fine" it's basically for the GF she is an absolute torrent lunatic and although Swedish ISP laws privacy are quite protective of their customers it's better to be safe.

Throughput is fine, we get about 80% of 250mbit it seems.

I can now watch iPlayer and 4player which is worth the couple of dollars per month.

I've dealt with their customer support a few times already and they were really decent, spoke like British teen-agers, which freaked me out but they knew their stuff so who cares :p

I have nothing to compare them too but I can recommend them on face value for a broad use, I can't be sure they are ultra secure but for the price I'm happy.
 
Hi,

I ended up with 2 years with Surfshark.
They kept popping up in comparison reviews and when I checked them their price was by far the best just now.

They seem "fine" it's basically for the GF she is an absolute torrent lunatic and although Swedish ISP laws privacy are quite protective of their customers it's better to be safe.

Throughput is fine, we get about 80% of 250mbit it seems.

I can now watch iPlayer and 4player which is worth the couple of dollars per month.

I've dealt with their customer support a few times already and they were really decent, spoke like British teen-agers, which freaked me out but they knew their stuff so who cares :p

I have nothing to compare them too but I can recommend them on face value for a broad use, I can't be sure they are ultra secure but for the price I'm happy.

I also signed up to Surfshark a few hours after I asked :) I only have a 52mbit connection and get about 90% throughput on average. I will probably never test the streaming functionality as I have no interest in it.

EDIT: I paid about £36.61 for a 2 year Surfshark subscription and Topcashback is tracking my cashback for it at £25.58 :eek:
 
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How are you finding this? I'm currently thinking about getting my first VPN and this one seems like a good price for 2 years. Did you receive the cashback from TCB?

It seems quite good so far. I get full speed via OpenVPN UDP when downloading from FTP but haven't really tested torrents. The app on Windows is stable but it doesn't work at all on Android. It just says "connecting" all the time and tends to make my phone so unstable to the point that I have to reboot it.

Have received the cashback yet, and it also hasn't been confirmed.
 
So I’m in the market for a decent vpn. I got a free yrs sub for avast vpn but it wasn’t really that good tbh.

Anyhow have had a few people say nordvpn is probably the best but then I’ve seen surf shark being mentioned a few times.

How are both for Netflix/Disney+ streaming?? I’ve got my fire tv connected through my WiFi so once I have it set up I guess it will just route through my WiFi connection.
 
Well I signed up for 2 yes on Surfshark just an hr ago and as of yet I can’t even login lol. Says too many attempts have been made etc etc. So spoke to their live support and they can’t figure it out.

I’ll give it a few more hrs before I just ask them to cancel the subscription as it’s pretty poor on their part if I can’t even use the damn vpn.
 
Hi,

I ended up with 2 years with Surfshark.
They kept popping up in comparison reviews and when I checked them their price was by far the best just now.

They seem "fine" it's basically for the GF she is an absolute torrent lunatic and although Swedish ISP laws privacy are quite protective of their customers it's better to be safe.

Throughput is fine, we get about 80% of 250mbit it seems.

I can now watch iPlayer and 4player which is worth the couple of dollars per month.

I've dealt with their customer support a few times already and they were really decent, spoke like British teen-agers, which freaked me out but they knew their stuff so who cares :p

I have nothing to compare them too but I can recommend them on face value for a broad use, I can't be sure they are ultra secure but for the price I'm happy.

I'm with express and from a 250mb virgin connection I'm getting about max 10% throughput, usually less. Whilst Connecting to uk servers. What settings do you recommend? Or does anyone using express have tips please?
 
I'm with express and from a 250mb virgin connection I'm getting about max 10% throughput, usually less. Whilst Connecting to uk servers. What settings do you recommend? Or does anyone using express have tips please?

How about telling us what you are using to run the VPN side of things? A low end MIPS based router with no hardware FPU/hardware acceleration running OpenVPN doing 25Mbit doesn’t sound bad, running on a modern (desktop) CPU with hardware acceleration via a wired connection, not so much.

I run OpenVPN on an i3 7100 based router with a 210-220Mbit connection, I can normally clear 200Mbit via VPN using a wired connection.
 
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Has anyone got Netflix US working with their VPN provider on Android TV? I'm with Nord and they used to have specific servers to connect to but now they just say to connect to any of their US servers and then clear cache and data on the Netflix app. This works on my Android tablet but not on my Nvidia Shield. I can list the US only content but when I click play it detects the VPN.
 
I've just realised my PIA subscription is due soon and I'm wondering if there are any better options out the for a similar (or lower) cost?

I've always found PIA to be fine in terms of speed and reliability but read somewhere that they have been bought by someone with a less than spectacular reputation - are there other providers I should be considering?
 
https://www.ovpn.com/en/guides/raspberry-pi-raspbian

Anyone know what to do instead of this?

cd /tmp && wget https://files.ovpn.com/raspbian/ovpn-us-newyork-tcp.zip && unzip ovpn-us-newyork-tcp.zip && mkdir -p /etc/openvpn && mv config/* /etc/openvpn && chmod +x /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf && rm -rf config && rm -f ovpn-us-newyork-tcp.zip

if you already have the .ovpn files downloaded as per the below instructions?

https://support.surfshark.com/hc/en...3-How-to-set-up-Surfshark-VPN-on-Raspberry-Pi

i can set up the VPN as per surfshark instructions but it won't auto start on boot up and I need to put the following command

sudo openvpn /etc/openvpn/us-dal.prod.surfshark.com_udp.ovpn

changing the .ovpn file for the server i want to connect to and then also input my username then hit enter then put in the password then hit enter.

I want to automate so it automatically logs into a specific .ovpn on startup which i'll name "default" and then I'll rename whatever server I want to default and rename the old default to what it was then reboot so i can switch servers that way if i need to.
 
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