Speedify
Fast & Reliable VPNWhen choosing which VPN to use, you’ll see that you have hundreds of options in front of you. What makes choosing a VPN hard and tedious is the fact that they all look alike. They all promise fast speeds, unparalleled security features, plenty of advanced options, and much more. So, for a VPN to stand out, it really needs to think of something different – which is precisely what Speedify offers. Aside from offering all of the features you’d typically expect from a VPN, Speedify promises to combine two different types of connections via its ‘revolutionary’ channel bonding technology. So, what does this actually mean, and what are the benefits of channel bonding? Is this VPN better than typical VPNs offered in today’s market? Let’s find out. Welcome to our hands-on review of Speedify VPN!
Before we get to all those advanced and unique features that this VPN offers, we’ll first introduce you to its basic set of features. For this purpose, we’ve prepared three tables for you – with the first one giving you a series of comparative points that come in handy if you’re in doubt when choosing between different solutions.
We’re sure that many of you are fans of media streaming. One of the benefits of using VPNs is that you can unblock websites and access different editions of your favorite streaming platform. With this in mind, we’ve tested Speedify with the world’s most popular streaming websites, so here are the details.
And finally, we’d like to present our post-review conclusions. This is why you’ll find one more table below, created for those who’re in a rush. So, take a quick look to see this VPN’s standouts and downsides
That would be it for our introductory segment. If you’d like to learn about Speedify from the inside out, make sure to stick with us. So, let’s get started.
Speedify VPN – Technical Umair Hands-On Review
We’ll review Speedify by checking and testing various aspects of this VPN service. To learn more about this process and the way we rate VPN services, we have a dedicated article on how we review VPNs. Make sure to take a look before you start reading this review, so you can set your expectations accordingly.
Speedify is a US-based VPN with ostensible connections to the intelligence community. There were also reports about data leaks in the past.Our Score: 1/10.
Checking the jurisdiction of your chosen VPN is more important than you might think. By choosing a VPN headquartered in a country with aggressive data logging and mass-surveillance, you’re putting yourself at risk of having your data collected (and vice versa). So, here’s what you need to keep in mind before getting your Speedify subscription.
Jurisdiction & Applicable Laws
Speedify launched back in 2014, as a channel bonding service. However, this wasn’t the first software product made by its parent company, Connectify Inc. This company was founded in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) in 2009, which is when its first product (Connectify Hotspot) launched. In the meantime, they’ve switched to a freemium commercial model and received funding from In-Q-Tel, a Virginia-based venture capital firm (connected with organizations like the CIA, DIA, NGA, and the wider intelligence community). Connectify also relied on Kickstarter in the past, to further develop their applications.
Speedify VPN review
Making use of a VPN almost always cuts your internet speeds, which is no real surprise given all that encryption overhead.
Speedify aims to fight this by sharing your internet traffic across any available connections: Ethernet, a tethered mobile, Wi-Fi and more, up to ten in total. If one connection type is slow, Speedify seamlessly moves some of your traffic to another, maximizing your bandwidth. All this happens in the background, entirely transparent to your applications, which carry on working just as they always did (except faster, hopefully).
You don't need multiple connections to use the service, it works just fine with one – although obviously in this case, you won't get the same channel bonding advantages. However, the company still claims its other connection technologies could help improve speeds.
- Want to try Speedify? Check out the website here
Privacy and logging
The Speedify privacy policy is far clearer and more specific than most of the competition, going into great detail on what it collects, and what it doesn't.
The good news is that the company claims it doesn't keep a history of the sites you visit, or the content of the data you send or receive.
The bad news is that there's some session logging, including the wi-fi SSID of your network, your public IP address, your device ID, the time you connected, the amount of data transferred and the length of the session.
That could be enough to identify your approximate location and generate a unique identifier for your device, allowing it to be recognized next time. It's a little more logging than we would normally expect, but it's necessary to manage Speedify's free plan. (The company needs to track the data you use, and the device where you're using it, to keep you to the 10GB limit.)
While this isn't necessarily a problem, we're left to take it on trust that this is all Speedify does. Other VPNs are increasingly putting themselves through independent audits - TunnelBear now has its apps, website and infrastructure audited every year - to confirm that they're living up to their promises, and we'd like to see other providers follow suit.
