PC Magazine - USA (2021-03)

(Antfer) #1

Mullvad has no such aspirations. Its VPN is its sole product. The service does
allow P2P and BitTorrent, but does not provide ad-blocking at the network
level. That last point is a non-issue, since a standalone ad-blocker does a better
job anyway.


SPEED TEST RESULTS
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always means a hit to performance. To try and get a sense of that impact, I use
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(Note that Ookla is owned by J2 Global, the parent company of PCMag’s
publisher Ziff Media.)


Keep in mind that these results are only accurate for a particular time and place
and are not an evaluation of each VPN’s overall performance. It’s useful for
comparison, but your experience will almost certainly differ.


My tests showed that Mullvad had minimal impact on internet performance,
beating the median results for download, upload, and latency. Using Mullvad
increased latency by 41.5 percent, and reduced upload and download speeds by
20 percent and 59.5 percent, respectively. The upload scores are particularly
impressive, placing it among the top four contenders in that category.


Note that Mullvad supports WireGuard extensively. In my testing, the app
defaulted to OpenVPN and I chose to leave it at the default settings. You can see
how Mullvad compares to the fastest VPNs out of the nearly 40 we’ve tested.

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