AirVPN Review

AirVPN has been around for over eleven years, formed in Italy in 2010 by a small group of activists and hackers, with the help of two lawyers. In that time it’s never faced any security scandals or been bought out by a larger company.

Originally it was operated by Iridium, a satellite communications company, but AirVPN took over in November 2012. Paolo Brini is listed as the current owner of AirVPN, which is operated from Perugia (Italy).

Even today, AirVPN is operated exclusively by activists and ‘security issues aware persons’. It’s still based in Italy, putting it within reach of EU data retention laws.

AirVPN’s logging policy is fairly vague, so we contacted customer support for clarification.

After speaking to them we feel confident that AirVPN doesn’t monitor anything you do while connected to the VPN. It only collects ‘technical data’ for server maintenance purposes, but you can request for this to be deleted at any point.

AirVPN also doesn’t log any information that could be used to personally identify you, such as date/timestamps or your IP address, making it one of the most privacy-friendly VPN services out there and mitigating its Italian jurisdiction.

While AirVPN isn’t reaching the exceptional peak speeds of some of the fastest VPN services, it does stand out for the sheer level of reliability on offer.

These speeds are good enough for buffer free streaming.

It’s not an ideal VPN for keen gamers, though, with ping times hovering around 18ms, even when we were connected to a VPN server in the same city as us.

If you’re based in the UK, here are the average speeds you can expect from AirVPN connecting out to a handful of popular locations:

USA: 40Mbps (download) & 47Mbps (upload)
Germany: 55Mbps (download) & 72Mbps (upload)
Singapore: 33Mbps (download) & 16Mbps (upload)
Australia: No server available

To read more about how we test VPNs, you can read our full speed testing methodology here.

While certainly fast enough for buffer-free Full HD streaming, AirVPN doesn’t work with either Netflix or BBC iPlayer.

Because there are no AirVPN servers optimized for accessing streaming sites, it’s a case of trial and error, and we haven’t been able to unblock US Netflix for several months now.

It’s the same story with BBC iPlayer, which has always been inaccessible via AirVPN’s UK-based servers. These VPNs will stream BBC iPlayer, though.

Surprisingly, given the difficulty we’ve had accessing BBC iPlayer or Netflix, AirVPN was one of the few providers to work with Disney+ at its launch. Which is great to see.

Thankfully, on AirVPN’s website there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ which users can check to see if the situation with these streaming sites ever changes.

AirVPN is, however, a strong choice for anonymous torrenting and P2P activities. One of the best we’ve seen.

Its good download speeds and impressive upload speeds, minimal logging policy and suite of advanced privacy tools (including a VPN kill switch) make it ideal for P2P activity.

Advanced torrenters will also like that AirVPN allows port forwarding on up to 20 ports simultaneously, to speed up transfers even more.

You can do this in the ‘Client Area’ of the AirVPN website. Read more about AirVPN’s remote port forwarding here.

How Does AirVPN Compare to Other VPNs for Torrenting?

AirVPN is one of the best VPNs for torrenting, but how does it compare to the competition?

We’ve put together this table for you to compare AirVPN on factors like bitrate and advanced features:

Currently, the only way to connect to a VPN server in China is to use the OpenVPN protocol over SSL, which encrypts your OpenVPN ‘fingerprint’ to make it undetectable. This is simple enough to do on desktop but more complex on mobile.

If you want to connect out from China on mobile devices using AirVPN you’ll have to install OpenVPN files and do some manual configuration – there are step-by-step guides on the website to walk you through the process.

AirVPN should work to bypass censorship in Turkey, Iran, and other highly-restricted countries. This is due to its range of additional obfuscation tools such as SSH/SSL tunneling and access to Tor through the VPN.

Its limited server network is bad news for speed, though, as it means you may find yourself having to connect to an AirVPN server far away from your physical location.

AirVPN is a fantastic choice if pure privacy is your priority. Encryption is via top cipher AES-256 and the software runs on OpenVPN or WireGuard, which offer the best balance between security and performance.

The VPN kill switch is an essential feature to protect you in case of connection drops, and AirVPN also operates its own DNS servers, keeping your personal information confidential.

AirVPN’s protection against DNS, IPv6, and WebRTC leaks was also proven to be 100% effective in our latest tests.

You can use AirVPN to access the Tor browser, giving you an extra layer of encryption should you need it. The desktop app also offers ‘doublehop’, a feature that routes your traffic through an intermediate server to help avoid geolocation censorship.

AirVPN says that its customer service isn’t outsourced in order to provide “high-quality support,” however a lack of live chat and slow email replies can be frustrating when you just have a simple question.

We like the extensive knowledge base on AirVPN’s website though, which includes a FAQs section divided up by topic. There’s also a whole host of AirVPN community forums covering every topic you could think of, so you may find you don’t actually need to contact the support team very often.