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Comment by mft_ | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but I recently discovered Mullvad. For years, I've used whichever mainstream VPN provider had a good deal on come renewal time, and cycled through a few of the usual suspects. Recently, I was with Surfshark, and was really struggling to get download rates above a few hundred K/sec - and sometimes even worse. I didn't even suspect the VPN at first, but ultimately tried a different provider as a diagnostic step.

I randomly came across a recommendation for Mullvad from reddit, and signed up for a month. Hot damn if my download rate didn't shoot up to 15-20 MB/sec (that's megabytes, not bits) - essentially close to maxxing out my fibre.

Turns out you really do get what you pay for - and I doubt I'll be leaving Mullvad any time soon.

(no affiliation - just a happy and surprised customer!)

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+1 for Mulvad, it Just Works and they are a great service provider.

(also no affiliation, just a happy customer)

Which exit point are you using? How close is it to you? I only get about 5MBps no matter which node I use and have suspected ISP throttling, but haven't tested too much since 5MBps is enough to get by with; this might make a good way to gather more info.

With Surfshark, an assortment of (mostly) European locations - e.g. Germany, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Switzerland. When things were slow, the choice of exit location didn't seem to make much difference - tho' sometimes I needed to cycle through to find one that worked at all.

With Mullvad, a similar choice of locations - again, it doesn't seem to matter, but in a good way.

How are Mullvad apps across multiple platforms? I've been with PIA for quite a while, and I got it to work they way I want it, on macOS, windows and android, and I liked even more some of their recent exit points marked "for streaming", as I watch sports online, and there is a significant improvement when using those, with some countries local free broadcasting, but performance in the rest , sometimes, is really atrocious. I am just concerned about trading performance gain for tweaks/options/stability on multiple platforms (never found OpenVPN to be better, at least when it comes to PIA apps).

used it on macos, ios, linux. the app is solid. wireguard rules.

I use the app frequently on Android and Arch Linux, and it works equally well on both.

I use it on Mac, Windows, and iOS - they just work well.

The ios app reviews of PIA says it's now owned by a company which used to make malwares. I'm really happy with PIA as compared to Mullvad. Works better for me but this review is making me feel unsafe :(

The PIA app is lovely. Mullvad's as well

I used mullvad for streaming sports in Australia being in Europe at the time, no problem streaming in full HD. My machine is running linux although I doubt that makes a difference.

That's strange. I've had the opposite experience. I was with Cyberghost and, after 3 yrs of good speeds, almost overnight it basically became so slow that it was unusable. I then tried out Surfshark and have been very happy with the speeds that I've gotten for the past year+.

I had been with Surfshark for nearly a year when everything slowed down. They could have been having temporary technical issues, of course, but it went on over a long enough period that my troubleshooting made it through multiple steps to trying a different VPN provider - so over a week, IIRC.

In the end, it depends on how your ISP peers with your VPN provider's network. VPN companies tend to host their servers on networks with cheap bandwidth, which don't necessarily have great peering with many residential ISPs.

Mullvad is fantastic. I get full bandwidth when torrenting 24/7 from my NAS, and I don't get blocked when I need to stream something unavailable in my country, and they have port forwarding support. They also have an Android TV client so I can watch on my couch.

All for €5 a month? Such a great company.

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