Thursday, October 11th, 2018 (9:52 am) - Score 3,730

Internet speed testing giant Ookla (Speedtest.net) has named NordVPN as the first Virtual Private Network (VPN) provider to receive its new Speedtest Recommended Badge, which is said to be in recognition of the platform’s fast connection speeds.

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) essentially encrypts and routes your internet activity through a different protocol and server (i.e. a private network connection that runs over the public internet). Remote workers often use VPNs to connect with their office network while at home and ordinary consumers may use one too, such as for remote work, remote desktop control, avoiding internet filtering (e.g. hotel wifi) or geo-blocking and to stay anonymous online.

However one common problem is that not all VPNs are able to keep up with the latency or speed of your physical broadband ISP connection (assuming you have a good one), which can hamper the end-user experience. Testing this is also particularly difficult because many VPNs will offer you a choice of different servers to connect through (NordVPN offers 5118 servers in 62 countries) and some will perform differently from others.

In that sense it’s good to see NordVPN win the first official recognition for VPN performance from Ookla.

Laura Tyrell, Press Officer at NordVPN, said: “We’re honored to receive the Speedtest Recommended badge from Ookla. This badge proves our continued effort to provide a cost-effective, well thought-out and fast VPN service. Over the years, NordVPN has become a leading online security solution with more than 8 million users worldwide.”

Sadly the announcement doesn’t include any details about what sort of testing methodology was adopted or a summary of the results. As such we’re going to recommend that this be taken with a pinch of salt, particularly given the knowledge of how many different aspects can affect VPN performance. We have asked for more information but so far there has been no response and we couldn’t find any information on Ookla’s site.

We did however uncover a couple of Ookla pages that looked at the speed impact of using VPNs (here and here), which noted that TorGuard could reduce your download speed by -3.7%, while IPVanish delivered a hit of -4.3%, NordVPN -5.1%, CyberGhost -5.3%, privateinternetaccess -5.9% and the worst was TunnelBear on -69.1%.

Otherwise NordVPN claims to be one of the most advanced VPN service providers, offering double VPN encryption, ad blocking, Onion Over VPN and privacy (zero logging). The service currently costs about $3.99 per month.