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 – 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.

The My Expat Network server network is focused on giving access to streaming services in just 12 countries.

It serves these countries well, but offers nothing outside of them. This means that the further you get away from these regions, the slower speeds you can expect.

That said, if you only want to access a VPN server in, say, the UK, your VPN provider having lots of servers near you won’t make any difference to your performance. Since My Expat Network’s sole focus is allowing you to stream content from certain countries, it makes sense that their server network is limited.

It would still be nice for its network to grow in the future, though, and there is nothing stopping it from adding additional servers in those 12 countries.

At the moment My Expat Network claims to have only 120 servers across these 12 countries, with no public statement on how many different IP addresses it maintains.

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 US Netflix 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 only 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.

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

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 – great news if you want to watch TV while living in, working in, or visiting a region with restricted internet.

According to customer services, the stealth protocol works in some regions of China, some of the time, but not everywhere.

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.

It’s 2021: we expect more than a tray app from a paid VPN service.

Unfortunately this is all My Expat Network have to offer on Mac and PC.

The tray app (menu bar app on Mac) can be confusing to users who aren’t expecting it and it also unnecessarily raises the learning curve. We find it a particularly odd choice given My Expat Network’s less tech-savvy target audience.

Once you get the hang of the client it is easy enough to use, though. We’ve certainly seen worse interfaces.

The menus are pretty limited, but this more down to a lack of features than poor design.

If you have the single country subscription package, your account will be limited to just one device, whereas the all countries and devices package will allow you to connect up to five devices at once.

The single country package will also limit you to either Mac/PC/router or to tablet/mobile, so make sure you get the right one before trying to install.

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.

As for payment options, My Expat Network doesn’t accept anything exceptional; you can pay with major credit and debit cards (no American Express), or with PayPal.

It does have a no questions asked 30-day money-back guarantee, though, which we really like.

For most users we do not recommend My Expat Network.

A certain niche may find My Expat Network a good (or sometimes even the only) choice.

Its focus on access to streaming sites is unparalleled, particularly if you’re looking for access to less common streaming sites, or non-English language streaming sites in any of its 12 countries.

However, you can get more private providers with better speeds, a bigger server network, and good streaming options for far cheaper.

Additional research by Liam Mullally