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Comment by rgrmrts | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been a Mullvad user for a while now and it’s a really great service. Good speeds, good apps for mobile and desktop, and the flexibility to use wireguard yourself if needed.

I stopped using privateinternetaccess when their ownership stuff became really sketchy. I’d highly recommend Mullvad to anyone else looking for a good VPN provider.

Side note, Mozilla VPN uses Mullvad’s network under the hood.

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I googled to see if they are one of the vpn's that avertise agressively, apparently if I am not using <insert vpn> I am going to have cybercriminals litterally reach from under my desk and inappropriately touch me.

They seem to be one that doesnt have an affiliate programme, so they go to the top of my trust ranking.

They're also NYT Wirecutter's top pick, in large part because of their strong stance on privacy, publicly-available 3rd-party security audit and ability to pay anonymously.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-vpn-service/

and privacyguides.org (formerly privacytools.io) https://www.privacyguides.org/providers/vpn/

You can even pay for their service by mailing physical cash to their office!

I've been on a subscription for ages now. Haven't really cared about that amount of anonymity so I'm just using a Paypal for payment though

Protonmail/ProtonVPN allows cash payments by snail mail as well.

apparently if I am not using <insert vpn> I am going to have cybercriminals litterally reach from under my desk and inappropriately touch me.

Reminds me of the old "ZOMG! Your computer is broadcasting an IP address!! Send us money to save your live!!11!eleventy!1" ads.

Exact situation for myself. I was a PIA customer until Kape Technologies acquired PIA, prompting me to switch to Mullvad. After reading the post's title, I recoiled a little and said, "Oh no, not again," but, thankfully I was surprised by the content of the statement. I'm happy to see Mullvad is not compromising the quality of their service for a payout and continuing to demonstrate their value system that lead me to become a loyal customer.

I felt a bit like that about PIA but at this point I'm just glad they're not owned by Andrew Lee anymore.

>Mozilla VPN uses Mullvad’s network

Yeah I finally decided to leave PIA and at the time Mozilla started their offering. I figured I'd go through Mozilla to provide them some support while switching to a service I have some faith in.

I really like Mullvad, but I personally found the speeds to be pretty poor. It's been a while since I used it, but I remember not even being able to hit 100mbps download at times. On the other hand, in my experience, competitors can max out a gigabit connection.

Could you share some of those competitors? I've tried a few VPNs which have not been especially fast, e.g. https://ovpn.com. Would like to find one that supports IPsec, which is supported natively by several operating systems.

FoxyProxy supports IPSec and OpenVPN.

PIA (yeah, I know they are owned by a dodgy company now, and I sound like a shill by suggesting them) does really well. No problem maxing a gigabit connection, and their peering is even better than my ISP a lot of the time - I get lower latency when playing games on US servers when using their network. I reluctantly signed back up after having speed issues w/ Mullvad.

What ISP do you use if you don’t mind me asking? I’m on Verizon FIOS and I’m convinced they throttle certain traffic. I pay for 940mbps and generally get around 800 wired or 5-600 on wireless, but have noticed my speeds (on VPN) drop to 2-300. I do this dance with them every couple of months, get on the phone with support and just keep saying “ok yup did that still not seeing the correct speeds” and after a while they’ll sometimes say “let us try something on our end” after which speeds recover and stay good for a while til they start (allegedly) throttling again.

EDIT: I’ve gotten around 90% of my non-VPN speed through Mullvad FWIW

That's odd, I'm in London/UK and when I use Mullvad's London servers I can usually nearly max out a Gbit connection.

Interesting... maybe I should try again. I didn't have much luck on Virgin.

Some ISPs will throttle "looks like VPN traffic" on non-business lines. On the basis that VPN use is (apparently) a business thing.

Doesn't make much sense, but there's a lot of weird behaviour in the UK ISP business.

And as for what counts as "looks like VPN", I suspect they're just looking for GRE packets.

Some Mullvad servers are oversaturated at times, but I've been easily maxing a gigabit connection on Dallas servers for 6 months now. You just need to specify a specific server when connecting. If it's slow, try the next- generally higher #'s are better.

I've had this before and it can be "peering", which is much more obvious when you have a couple of different connections with different ISPs to test... i.e where one ISP will be much slower on the VPN, and only when using servers with a certain ISP on the other end due to peering arrangements between the two ISPs.

Mullvad tend to have a couple of options of ISPs across the servers in one location, and the couple of times I've come across peering I've always managed to find a combo that fully utilises my connection so far.

I switched to Mullvad recently after a comment on HN in this thread [0], very happy with the switch.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28165130

In that thread I learned a lot about Mullvad, thanks. Saw a few comments that made me wonder though.

I've recently switched from PIA to Mullvad for similar reasons. I do wish Mullvad had a plan with a larger device limit. With PIA, I could cover my household with a single plan. Mullvad's five device limit is insufficient. Maintaining multiple accounts is just tedious. Aside from that, I've been pretty happy with the switch.

I also switched from privateinternetaccess to Mullvad (I think about 3 years ago?). I've had a few issues with Mullvad's speed in the past, but the last couple of years has been smooth service. My only complaint - and please note I havent check recently if this is still the case - is there's no discount for yearly subscriptions. I usually buy 12 months at a time and I wish they'd shave a few bucks off that, but honestly it's a very affordable service to begin with.

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