My Expat Network Review

My Expat Network is run by My Expat Network Ltd., which was incorporated in Hong Kong in March 2011.

Its focus has always been on providing expats with access to streaming services from their home nations – this differs from most commercial VPN services, which put an equal if not greater focus on privacy and security.

We used to rate Hong Kong as one of the best places on Earth for privacy, but unfortunately the reality of the situation is now more complex.

Hong Kong itself has very liberal data laws which have historically been ideal for running a VPN, but its proximity to and volatile relationship with mainland China have made it difficult to predict whether this will continue to be the case in the future.

Recently, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam oversaw the blocking of at least one VPN service in the region. We can’t guarantee that My Expat Network, even with the best of intentions, won’t be compromised or banned in the future.

You can really tell that privacy isn’t the focus of My Expat Network. We weren’t able to find any logging or privacy policy for the VPN online – only one for the website.

After talking to customer service we have discovered that My Expat Network doesn’t log user activity, but does log:

• Your IP address
• The time and date of connection
• Server location of each connection

My Expat Network keeps this data for up to two years.

This is too much data collection – it builds a detailed picture of your online activity and would totally de-anonymize you were anyone to access these logs. It goes far beyond what is necessary to run the service.

We also think that VPNs should provide transparent reports of what they do with their customer data as a matter of practice, even if its main focus isn’t privacy – as is the case here.

As a streaming focused VPN we were hoping that My Expat Network would have consistently good speeds, especially when connecting to nearby servers.

Sadly, this wasn’t the case.

Our download speed loss when running My Expat Network: 55%

Ping was surprisingly bad too – 55ms on a same city connection – so we wouldn’t recommend gaming while connected to this provider.

The only server with latency low enough to game with anything like good ping was the Netherlands at 14ms.

Globally, speeds were pretty underwhelming, and often not enough to stream video without at least some buffering:

• USA: 22.27Mbps (download) & 44.57Mbps (upload)
• Germany: 34.63Mbps (download) & 90.96Mbps (upload)
• Norway: 28.7Mbps (download) & 68.1Mbps (upload)
• Australia: 6.29Mbps (download) & 21.9Mbps (upload)

The best speeds we saw were in the Netherlands which saw a 34% drop in download speed and the worst were in Australia which saw a 94% drop.

Overall, these speeds have the potential to cause a pretty unsatisfactory streaming experience, particularly if you want to watch 4K, or even HD, content.

Given its specific focus, this is where we really expected My Expat Network to shine.

And we weren’t at all disappointed with what we saw.

We got access to favourites like BBC iPlayer and Amazon Prime without any problems at all, but My Expat Network goes way beyond these basics.

Its website has a TV Guide with the full suite of streaming services you can access from the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Italy and Germany.

The selection is exceptional.

The main thing which lets My Expat Network down here are its speeds, which prevent you from watching all this in Full HD a lot of the time.

It also hasn’t worked with some premium services for a long time, though, including US and UK Netflix and DAZN.

P2P traffic is technically allowed on My Expat Network’s Netherlands servers.

When we tested it, though, we found P2P traffic was blocked on this server too.

If you try to torrent on any other server, the service ends your connection without warning. Since My Expat Network does not have a kill switch, this leaves you dangeriously exposed.

Combined with its unnecessary logging practices, this means we we don’t recommend torrenting with My Expat Network.

The slow speeds aren’t ideal for downloading or seeding large files, either.

My Expat Network includes a stealth option for all of its servers – which should be great news if you want to watch TV while living in, working in, or visiting a region with restricted internet.

Unfortunately, when we tried to access the service from our Shanghai server we found it was blocked.

According to customer services, the stealth protocol works in some regions of China, some of the time, but not everywhere. We’ve not seen any evidence to prove this, though.

We haven’t been able to find much customer testimony of it working in restricted regions, either.

If you already have My Expat Network it might be worth giving it a go in China, but if you want to guarantee access to the free internet we would recommend using a more reliable VPN for the country.

Another thing to bear in mind is that My Expat Network’s stealth protocol is not available on iOS.

My Expat network makes use of AES-256, which is some of the strongest encryption available and currently unbroken, a great sign from a security perspective.

The protocol being used varies depending on which device you use. Windows and MacOS both make use of OpenVPN – a well trusted and versatile protocol. iOS is on IKEv2 which is also great, and our preferred protocol for mobile connections.

The Android app uses L2TP, though, which is an outdated standard. There are worse protocols out there, but we’d like to see My Expat Network move over to IKEv2 for Android as well.

The app does feature a kill-switch, although it can be difficult to find. This means if your connection to the VPN server drops your IP will be protected.

We didn’t see any DNS, IP, or WebRTC leaks, either, which is a good sign for both your privacy and security.

There are online resources available, but they don’t cover everything and can be confusing to navigate, which makes direct interactions with customer support all the more likely.

My Expat Network doesn’t offer live-chat, which means you need to rely on an old-school email ticketing system.

Overall, though, our experience of this email system was pretty good. Answers to our questions always came within hours and often came within minutes, and generally we found them to be very helpful.

Live-chat would be easier for everyone involved, but My Expat Network’s support team does pretty well without it.