FastestVPN Overview - Objective Assessment

There are plenty of advantages to virtual private networks. It's no surprise that, in light of the latest telecommunications trends, tech-savvy audiences are increasingly turning to VPN providers. We decided not to stay away from scientific and technological progress trends and immediately tried FastestVPN in action, allowing us to establish a secure data transmission channel for web surfing quickly. Three pillars - usability, versatility, and affordability - were at the forefront of our evaluation of FastestVPN. But first, let's look at a little theory.

What Is a VPN?

In simple words, a VPN is a service that provides information protection services. This technology provides secure online activity, access to blocked resources, and special offers for residents of certain regions. A VPN connects your device - smartphone, tablet, laptop, or personal computer - to a third-party server.

VPN is short for Virtual Private Network. VPN is several technologies that provide the ability to connect computers or other devices to create a private network. The devices appear to be nearby, but their actual locations may be thousands of kilometers apart. With a VPN, you are not directly connected to the Internet but through intermediary means. This connection takes place through a server in another country.

It is impossible to use the network without an IP address since the sites will not know where to send the requested information, which will lead to the interruption of the Internet connection. However, people can hide the IP address. VPN services help with this. What they do: Protect your IP address and encrypt data traffic. Consequently, such services offer anonymity while hiding the user's main trace.

When you connect to a VPN, your traffic goes through a remote server, that is, through a computer elsewhere in the world. It turns out that when you use the Internet with a VPN, it is as if you are using that remote computer and not your own.

When connected to a VPN server, data is transmitted through an encrypted tunnel. Information is exchanged with a remote local area network via a virtual channel over the Internet, simulating a private point-to-point connection. The "encrypted" part means that all of your data is sent in a non-interpretable form. "Tunnel" provides a secure connection of devices to the network. It turns out that only your device and server have access to the encryption conversion method.

Introducing FastestVPN

The founders developed FastestVPN as a unique place - the Cayman Islands. The company wants to comply with digital law, but this is just a desire; the actions are different. The Five Eyes community brings together the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Germany. The purpose of this union is to find and share information about suspicious activity on the Internet. That is, the government controls your online activities through the providers you use.

FastestVPN, located in the Cayman Islands, does not fall under Five Eyes' jurisdiction. We can conclude that FastestVPN will not be able to protect you from hacks or cyber-attacks. On the plus side, the VPN provider will not log all user data until you agree.

We want to make a small comparison regarding this company. As of today, there are 150 high-speed servers that FastestVPN provides. If you compare this amount with other companies, then the list is small. The company could not turn such a disadvantage into an advantage, since having a shortlist of servers, there are different connection delays. Yes, they have not overlooked the leading countries in the world like the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, but overlooked many other countries that need a VPN.

We will inform you right away that you will encounter the problem of significant delays. There were performance bottlenecks during peak traffic. We carried out this experiment at night since you can successfully learn the program's weaknesses and advantages at such a time. Unfortunately, even at night, when connecting to the US region, we found slowdowns, even though it was night and the load on the server should be below. Also, below you will learn more about other evaluation criteria. If you want to save yourself from bad choices, then read the article to the end.

Pricing

FastestVPN is a very recent company. One of our main evaluation criteria is pricing. FastestVPN is pursuing an aggressive pricing strategy to attract as many audiences as possible. FastestVPN's 1-month plan averages $ 10, but it drops to a low of $ 2.49 over the annual plan, just $ 1.11 a month if you pay three years in advance, and a tiny $ 0.83 - yes, 0.83 dollars - a month for five years.

FastestVPN provides the ability to connect to several devices at once, which is welcome, but this function is available on almost all VPN servers. Using the program, you can decide how many devices to connect. The maximum number is ten devices. The VPN service was surprised by its payment methods. FastestVPN only accepts two methods of payment - credit cards and PayPal. Perhaps in the future, the company will launch other payment methods, but today this is a big drawback. This feature makes the purchase very inconvenient for users who do not have such payment methods.

Now we would like to talk about the money-back guarantee. Many companies support this feature, and FastestVPN does not lag behind its competitors. FastestVPN can provide the user with a 7-day money-back guarantee. During this time, a person can demand a refund if they are not satisfied with their purchase or the program's operation. The 7-day money-back guarantee is very inconvenient, as most other services offer 30 days. Sometimes the program can crash for the second week of use, but it is impossible to see it after the first week. Such a short money-back guarantee indicates that the company has doubts about the product and is afraid that it will not meet users' expectations.

It would be more convenient if the company offered a trial version, but unfortunately, there is no such offer. We consider this a disadvantage since the user cannot objectively rate applications without this feature. The only option to test the program is to buy a monthly plan for $ 10 and then decide for yourself whether to buy a subscription for one, two, or three years. If you do not like the service, you can get your money back. But you can only get your money back if you have not exceeded your VPN connection limit more than 100 times and are not late to apply the 7-day money-back guarantee.

Customer Support

FastestVPN offers users live chat support. But before getting answers to your questions, the bot will communicate with you. That is, the bot reacts to keywords and offers tips for solving the problem. You will have to wait and click on the button, which will indicate that you did not find the answer to your question. Only after that, a specialist will contact you. The company is seriously saving on the online support center. The disadvantage is that you have to wait until the specialist is released. Sometimes it can take a whole day. If you want to contact the company via email, then this action will fail. The company does not respond well to inquiries via email. We asked a question to the support team and received a response a week later. Accordingly, you will not be able to solve the problem quickly.

Privacy and Registration

The FastestVPN website has a separate section in which they inform that the company does not keep any logs. After reading the section, we noticed the decoding of this statement. The company claims that it never, under any circumstances, records user activity on the Internet. Further, they argue that the company does not monitor your IP address and actions when connecting to the VPN. Such statements aroused our suspicions, and for a good reason.

We went to the Privacy Policy section and noticed a similar statement: the company does not provide archive logs. However, the question arises - a company that does not keep logs can store them at all? This is a vague statement that confuses users. We also noticed that the company does not store information about your website browsing history and data when downloading applications, games. The company makes sure that your DNS queries remain with you and only you.

At first glance, the promises look very decent. However, no user will determine if the company lives up to these promises since any documents do not back up the policy. By contacting the support service, you will not receive any documents confirming their words. Yes, most companies write the same communication, but some brands have been publicly audited and proven that their words are consistent with the actions. We hope that this supplier will prove their promises in practice in the next few years, but unfortunately, the picture regarding confidentiality looks strange.

Hands-On With FastestVPN

Considering FastestVPN from a design point of view, the program looks pretty bright and attractive. Also, the program has a funny interface that any user can understand. The largest section in the program is, of course, a list of servers that recommends users to connect to the VPN, depending on your location. You will not have any problems with the connection, as the program has a large "Connect" button that quickly responds to the request.

The Settings section looks very poor, and there are a few functions that you can change. Regarding protocols, there are just a few of them - OpenVPN, IKEv2, L2TP, PPTP. The program automatically selects the protocol but allows you to choose from which you like the most. At first glance, the program does not have many functions, but it takes up a lot of space on the device. Also, during use, we found problems with the functioning of the server. For example, if you connect to the server, you will not receive a notification about whether the program is protecting your data. Annoying one more function. If you want to disable VPN, you will receive the message "Are you sure?" To disconnect from VPN, you need to give consent. Other programs do not send these messages.

Above, we have listed a few details that greatly annoy users, but we noticed other problems. We tried to close the IVEv2 connection with the kill option disabled forcibly. The program should have issued some warning, as a cyber-attacker could have done this, but this was not the case. The programs only showed that the user was still connected to the program and could not forcibly close the connection. Such a strange failure of the system causes suspicion and distrust of the program as a whole. After a while, we tested this action again, and the program blocked internet access. Our confidential data has not been disclosed to third parties. However, such unstable work calls into question the program and the user's device in the risk zone since a failure in the program can lead to the device's failure.

We didn't stop with experimentation and decided to test the emergency switch, which again revealed the problem. When we decided to disconnect from the VPN and disconnect the Internet connection, the program did not immediately react. The program with which we tested the emergency switch showed that our real IP address was to the outside world for a few seconds. An ordinary user who does not have a testing program does not know that the server is disclosing data. Thus, we cannot confidently assert that the programs are reliable in use. Hopefully, FastestVPN will resolve these issues soon in the next updates. If the company ignores such failures, then the program will not be able to function normally.

Netflix and FastestVPN

FastestVPN has a separate section dedicated to Netflix. We are delighted that the site is proud to stream, buffer, view, listen to content censored or geo-restricted from anywhere in the world. However, we failed in testing.

We can prove from our own experience that FastestVPN cannot unblock Netflix and other restricted programs. For example, when we connected to one of FastestVPN's servers, it could not affect the stable operation of BBC iPlayer. On the screen, we saw the pending message "this content is not available in your region."

However, FastestVPN allows you to watch blocked YouTube content seamlessly. We opened the content to the US, and it worked stably. Later we decided to test the program to unblock Netflix. Unfortunately, we were not able to view the content with the same success. We used seven American FastestVPN servers, and none of them responded.

Netflix's current aggressive attitude towards VPN is that the program wants to protect its regional streaming agreements. Users who download a VPN to view Netflix will not enjoy the program, even though FastestVPN says otherwise. Perhaps a few will be able to unblock Netflix, but judging by the reviews, the next day, Netflix is ​​blocking the entrance. FastestVPN guarantees stable work with Netflix, but it is obvious that this is a hoax.

Performance

On its website, FastestVPN claims that the program includes an ad-blocking feature. We are wary of such statements, as we have seen more than once that services are deceiving. While testing the program, we noticed that the company was not able to cope with adblocking. All sites that we visited contain ads, and information is hard to read. Also, the site itself provides advertising services. That is, it publishes third-party links that may endanger users.

Each of you can test the program for the quality of the function - adblocking. To do this, go to any site and see if there are any tabs with ads. You do not need to configure anything further, as the program automatically runs on every device. You can easily do it without installing any additional software. Unfortunately, the program will not be able to block ads.

We also checked the speed of Internet loading when connecting to FastestVPN servers. Before connecting to the server, the Internet speed was 234 Mbps. After connecting to a VPN server in the UK, the internet speed dropped to 75Mbps. We can confidently say that FastestVPN has poor-quality Internet connections and significantly slows down the speed. This is not the fastest VPN we've tested. Some servers reduced the speed by only 10%, but not 70%, as in FastestVPN.

Such a decrease in speed indicates that the server is very overloaded, and the system cannot cope with requests. We can note one interesting fact. No matter which server you connect to, the speed will be 50-70 Mbps, but not lower. That is, a student who wants to write a project and at the same time does not want to leave traces on the Internet may well use the service of this site. However, large companies will not be able to download large files since the download time can be as long as a day.

Server Locations

Choosing a country for your VPN server should be based on the following criteria:

• the shortest distance to you: this will provide less ping and loss in connection speed;
• the minimum number of bans on Internet freedom, the availability of any popular services;
• the least political tension between your country and the country where the VPN server will be located. In this case, your traffic from the VPN server will most likely not be read by the secret services of another state.

If we proceed from the maximum security of traffic from intelligence services, then the best solution would be a server in the UK. In practice, London servers do not always perform well in terms of stability: dumps occur, ping is so-so, and speed is lower than in Germany. As for FastestVPN, everything looks sad here. This company has a few VPN servers and is also poorly supported. Half of the continent's countries will not be able to use FastestVPN stably because FastestVPN only has points in leading countries. We do not see the point of buying such a program.

FastestVPN Protocols

A VPN protocol is the software foundation on which any VPN service is built. It describes the format of connection organization, data exchange within a private virtual network, and other software operation aspects.

The protocol's choice determines which tasks will be solved using it, how efficiently users will solve them, how safe it will be, quickly, etc. Each protocol has its own set of characteristics, based on which you need to choose the right one for yourself. Among them:

• Supported platforms - protocols can be quite specific and function exclusively on one or two operating systems. Others support all available operating systems at once.
• Supported Networks - not all protocols work on identical networks. Some VPNs only offer their services in specific countries due to technology restrictions imposed by government agencies.
• The speed of work also depends on the architecture of the protocol. Some transfer data faster on mobile devices. Some show peak performance only on the scale of large corporate networks.
• Security - protocols implement encryption and other data security mechanisms in different ways. Therefore, depending on the tasks set, choosing the least susceptible technology to attacks common to it is necessary.

If we consider specifically FastestVPN, then it uses only five protocols. This is very little for such a company. Let's take a look at each protocol separately.

PPTP

Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol is an old technology that has long passed into vintage and is now practically not used. Microsoft created it in 1999.

The protocol establishes a standard dual-channel PPP connection between devices and then transmits data through encapsulation using the Generic Routing Encapsulation method. Parallel to this, a TCP port connection operates. The first is used directly to transfer information, and the second is needed to control the connection.

PPTP is challenging to configure and manage. For example, due to the need to support two network sessions at once, it is difficult to redirect the firewall signal. Security suffers from GRE specifications and other protocol components.

Despite the presence of support for MS-CHAPv2 and EAP-TLS for user authorization, PPTP remains an insecure VPN protocol that is not recommended for solving serious problems. You can pick up a key and get access to a private network in about 23 hours using a specialized online service.

L2TP

L2TP was conceived as an alternative to PPTP. The problem was the lack of data encryption mechanisms and authorization methods. Therefore, IPsec was always connected with it. Thus, it was possible to use the AES data encryption algorithms. Among the shortcomings of the method, one can single out the difficulties when working with some firewalls, and they often block port 500. And it is also slow because it encapsulates the transmitted information twice per session. Other protocols don't do this.

OpenVPN

The gold standard among current VPN protocols. Good on all fronts at once:

• It is versatile. It can be used for various purposes, whether you need a virtual "office" protected from prying eyes or a secure tunnel for OpenVPN created by an independent development team from OpenVPN Technologies. The main advantage of the protocol is open source code. He owes him wild popularity. Open Source has helped this technology pass dozens of independent audits from security firms. This was helped by custom encryption methods, support for SSL, and AES-256-GCM algorithms.
• It also delivers data transfer speeds faster than the competition. Many services that base their VPN servers on OpenVPN provide encrypted content transmission at speeds of up to 2000 Mbps.
• OpenVPN uses TCP and UDP technologies so that the standard can be used as an alternative to other protocols when the described standard is blocked on the provider's side. And it also works stably and less often than others lose their connection to the Internet (TCP support also helps in this).

The protocol is under active development and is constantly being overgrown with updated security standards and performance enhancements.

TCP

Connection-oriented communication can use reliable communication, for which the Layer 4 protocol sends acknowledgments of data receipt and requests retransmission if no data is received or is corrupted. TCP uses just this kind of reliable communication. TCP is used in application protocols such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and Telnet.

TCP requires that a connection be opened before sending a message. The server application must perform a so-called passive open to create a connection with a known port number, and instead of sending a call to the network, the server goes into waiting for incoming requests. The client application must do an active open by sending a sync sequence number to the server application that identifies the connection. The client application can use a dynamic port number as the local port.

The server should send an acknowledgment to the client along with the server sequence number. In turn, the client answers with ACK, and the connection is established. After that, the process of sending and receiving messages can begin. When a message is received, an ACK message is always sent in response. If the timeout expires before the sender receives the ACK, the message is placed on the retransmission queue.

UDP

Unlike TCP, UDP is a very fast protocol because it defines the smallest mechanism required to transfer data. Of course, it has some disadvantages. Messages arrive in any order, and whichever is sent first may be received last. Delivery of UDP messages is not guaranteed at all, the message may be lost, and two copies of the same message may be received. The latter case occurs when two different routes are used to send messages to one address.

UDP does not require a connection to be opened, and the program can send data as soon as it is prepared. UDP does not send acknowledgment messages so that data can be received or lost. If UDP requires reliable data transmission, it should be implemented in a higher layer protocol.

Online Reputation

Online reputation is an essential element of any company. Online reputation assessment is needed to understand how current and potential customers perceive the company. For example, netizens looking for a service or product might choose a company based on whether they liked the comments. We decided to rate FastestVPN's online reputation and were horrified by the many negative comments. You can see for yourself.

Pros and Cons

To date, FastestVPN has not received any awards for speed, availability, concurrent connection limit, privacy policy, or design quality. In general, the site has only a few advantages, but there are more disadvantages.

Pros:

• Affordable pricing
• No-logging policy

Cons:

• Too low internet speed
• A too short list of countries to which you can connect
• Waiting too long for a response from support
• Weak and outdated protocols
• The program can't unblock Netflix

Conclusion – Our Experience with FastestVPN

If you carefully study the "Performance" section, then judging by our experimental indicators, we can argue that the Internet download speed is very low when connected to a VPN. Also, you cannot unblock Netflix and download files from torrent sites.

For the payment the company charges, you get anti-malware protection and adblocking. But in practice, these functions do not work, and you still run into advertisements and cyber intrusions. The support service is poor. You may not respond quickly, and the team is not always ready to help with problems. The company does not train managers, which results in poor service quality.

You cannot hope for a secure connection as the site can easily reveal your real location. Although the company claims that it does not keep records of your internet surfing, this has not been documented. By applying for FastestVPN services, you will get a bad speed and not watch Netflix. We cannot recommend FastestVPN.

FAQ About FastestVPN Service

Since not all people are familiar with FastestVPN services, we decided to answer its most common questions.

Does the company register data about you?

The company firmly states that it does not track or record information about all site visitors. But one of the policy points states that the company collects username, password, and login attempts. How can a company claim that it does not register information if this clause in the policy contradicts its words? The company confuses its users a lot. There is a little explanation on the site regarding the data they collect. The company collects the username, password, and login attempts to control the multiple login feature and eliminate any user errors.

Can FastestVPN be configured for better device performance?

The site provides guides on how to set up your Apple TV. The company suggests downloading the FastestVPN app from the Play Store and setting up the program according to the instructions to customize Android TV and Android Box. The company also offers to configure FastestVPN on a WiFi router for Smart TV and then connect to your WiFi connection. There are very few functions for configuring the application. The company is reluctant to accept changes to the program on the users' side and sets its limits.

What is the speed of Internet traffic if you connect to FastestVPN?

The company does not take responsibility for the speed of your Internet, explaining this by several factors. The developers claim that internet speed depends on your internet connection's stability, the VPN protocol you are connected to, the distance between your current location and the VPN server. According to the company, when connected to the VPN, the speed will not decrease. However, any user can check it and see that FastestVPN reduces Internet speed by 30-70%. The only sensible advice that the company gave to avoid a LAN problem is to connect to the server that is closest to your current location.

Can I improve the speed when connecting to FastestVPN?

To get started, we advise you to check the Internet speed without connecting to a VPN. Then connect to the VPN and do the same. During testing, do not refresh the page or disconnect from the VPN. Compare your results. If you notice a strong decline, then you need to perform several actions. Change protocols first. PPTP is faster but has low data encryption. L2TP and OpenConnect protocols better protect your data. However, the Internet speed is weaker. We also recommend connecting to the server that is closest to your country.

Is there a trial version of FastestVPN?

No, the company does not provide a trial version. But you can get a refund if you don't like the program. Note that you have seven days to receive your refund.