VPNTunnel Review 2024: Before You Buy, Is It Worth It?

Connecting to VPNTunnel Imposed Significant Drops in Speed

VPNTunnel’s servers significantly slowed down my connection. My home network has a download speed that clocks in at 98.37 Mbps, while my speeds with VPNTunnel were less than 20% of that.

The drop was worse on distant connections. My download speed came to a crawling 14.18 Mbps when connected to a server in the US. While slowdowns are expected when using faraway servers, these are vast dips that will impact everything from web browsing to content streaming. In fact, I had the most terrible browsing experience with VPNTunnel.

Also, every time I tried connecting to a server, it took almost a minute to establish a connection. This is very frustrating, especially when you have to switch servers frequently.

I connected to a local server and tried opening Netflix, and it took almost a minute to open the home page. The video loaded after 10-12 seconds and the graphics were blurry with distorted voices. Also, there was frequent buffering throughout my testing.

Speed Test Results

VPNTunnel’s speeds are very inconsistent — usually below 20% of my baseline speed. Only the Australia server gave me speeds around 50.83Mbps, which also dropped to 16.76Mbps after I surfed the internet for a while. The Canada server clocked around 20 Mbps, the US server around 14Mbps, and the Japan server around 26Mbps.

During tests, I used WireGuard for Australia and Japan servers and OpenVPN over UDP/1194 for the US and Canada servers.

Some connections didn’t work at all. When I connected to the servers in the UK, Russia, Italy, and the Netherlands, my internet stopped working altogether.

Although using different protocols can impact speeds, this wasn’t the case with VPNTunnel. I had similar results even when I was connected to the PPTP protocol. Despite PPTP’s lower security, which should theoretically make it faster, my speeds did not improve.

Is VPNTunnel Fast Enough for Gaming? No

With high latency on all servers and slow connection speeds, VPNTunnel is not ideal for online gaming. I jumped into a game of Rocket League and experienced frequent stuttering, frame drops, and lag throughout the match. The lag was even apparent when connecting to a server in the same region as my home location.

I recommend ExpressVPN for gaming — the fastest VPN I’ve tested. It has a ton of native apps for consoles and boasts low ping that will be comparable to not being connected to a VPN at all.

Server Network — A Very Small Network With Limited Locations

VPNTunnel claims to have a modest network of 150+ servers spread across 32 countries. However, I only counted a total of 46 servers on the site’s server list. That is quite a large discrepancy in information. Even if the VPN had all of the servers that it claimed to, it still wouldn’t be a very large network.

Most regions will only have 1 or 2 servers to choose from. The only major exception to this is the US, which has 8 city-level servers to choose from, as well as East and West Coast servers optimized for streaming Netflix.

VPNTunnel has a handy server page on its website that allows you to keep track of how congested a server is, how high the latency is on the server, and whether the server is online or offline. There’s also a tracker that tells you how reliable the server is by giving the percentage of stable uptime.

There were a handful of specialized servers for streaming Netflix and BBC iPlayer. The servers optimized for streaming Netflix didn’t offer any noticeable changes in speed compared to the regular ones.

I also found that some of the labels for server regions were incorrect. I connected to what I thought was a US-based server and found that my region was being routed over to Frankfurt, Germany. While this only happened a couple of times, it can be frustrating, especially if you’re streaming with a VPN.

Security — Multiple VPN Protocols & AES-256 Bit Encryption

VPNTunnel doesn’t list its encryption protocols anywhere on the site for non-registered users. I had to contact support to find out that the VPN uses industry-standard AES 256-bit encryption. While that is good news, I shouldn’t have had to reach out to the support team to get that information. It should be plainly displayed on the site for prospective users.

If you have an account, you can go to the “servers” section under your account page to view the protocols supported by VPNTunnel. It has the following security protocols:

• OpenVPN — a secure, open-source protocol ideal for bypassing firewalls with strong encryption. You can use it over:

1. UDP/443
2. UDP/1194
3. TCP/1194
4. STUNNEL/443
5. STUNNEL/993

• IPsec IKEv2 — fast, stable protocol with strong security, ideal for mobile networks.
• WireGuard  — modern, efficient protocol offering top-notch encryption and speed with minimal overhead.
• PPTP/L2TP — fast, easy-setup protocol suited for streaming; less secure.

PPTP is the least secure and can be hacked in minutes, so I recommend avoiding PPTP if you want a secure connection.

I also did some leak tests. VPNTunnel passed the tests when the connection was stable. However, during significant speed drops that made browsing almost impossible, VPNTunnel failed to hide my real IP address and location.

Also, VPNTunnel has a kill switch only on its Windows app that you can toggle on to ensure your data remains secure and protected. This will block your device’s internet if your VPN connection drops unexpectedly. It worked fine when I tested it.

Privacy — A Questionable No-Logs Policy

VPNTunnel claims it keeps no user logs, but its privacy policy contradicts this despite being located in a privacy-friendly jurisdiction. Its privacy policy reveals that VPNTunnel doesn’t own its servers and that all user information goes to a third party. It also mentions that VPNTunnel will comply with any authorities if needed.

There’s also no mention of any independent audits, which are a great way to show that a VPN is verified to be secure outside of internal claims.

In addition, I found that VPNTunnel keeps data regarding payments, email addresses, and Google Analytics. While this isn’t a big concern, many other premium VPNs don’t keep this information and allow you to stay completely anonymous.

Please note that VPNTunnel’s privacy policy is applicable only to its servers in Sweden. It doesn’t have any privacy policy or logging policies for any other country in which it provides services. This makes it even more shady.

Torrenting — Not Recommended Due to Dubious Privacy Policy and Slow Connection Speeds

Torrenting is allowed on most of VPNTunnel’s servers, though you will have to go and check the server list on your account page to see which ones those are. The app does not have any tags for which servers do and don’t allow torrenting. Having to go back and forth between the site and the app was frustrating.

I don’t recommend VPNTunnel for P2P connections because of the inconsistent speeds and the questionable privacy policy. I torrented a file in the public domain and found that even small, well-seeded files took a long time. The 2GB file I chose took around 8 minutes, whereas I was able to download that same file in under 1 minute without being connected to the VPN.

Does VPNTunnel Work in China? Maybe

I reached out to the support team to ask if VPNTunnel works in China, and the agent said it does. However, I highly doubt that because it didn’t work properly even in the US, where it has most server locations. Even if it does, I recommend trying other reliable VPNs like ExpressVPN because you’ll have terrible speeds with this one.

Also, VPNTunnel’s privacy concerns—like not owning its servers and sharing data with third parties—could pose risks for users in China, where privacy and security are paramount.

Unfortunately, because I don’t have a teammate in China, I couldn’t test it. Also, customer support took 6 days to respond to my email. So I wouldn’t rely on VPNTunnel if I needed a VPN for China.

I was frustrated by the lack of accessible support from VPNTunnel. I reached out to the live chat and submitted help tickets over multiple days and never heard back. I kept getting a notification that the support team was offline and that they would send a response to my email, but no response ever came.

The only time I heard back was by sending an email directly to the support team instead of using the ticket submission tool on the website. Even then, getting a response took more than a day. In case you want to reach out, here’s the email id: support@vpntunnel.com.

One positive is that VPNTunnel has some decent guides on its helpdesk about most of the issues. These guides have step-by-step troubleshooting tips along with the screenshots. However, I found some of these guides and FAQs were outdated. So, it isn’t always reliable.