 Hello there, welcome back to Daniel's Tech World on Medium, YouTube and DanielRosal.com. So for today's video, I want to take a look at a VPN that I was sent to take a look at, and this VPN is ThunderVPN. By the way, it's not sent to take a look at this VPN from the VPN company, the vendor. So this is just my independent review and my thoughts about it. So this is, I thought, would be interesting because it's one of those obscure VPNs that I like to investigate. And the first thing, of course, in any good online investigator process would be to take a look at their, see what comes up in Google. So as you can see, you have ThunderVPN. They do have a listing on the App Store. I'm not sure this is actually the same company in it. I'm saying that because the logo looks different and the messaging is different and it's different. So this ThunderVPN here is Thunder.freeSignal.com. Now, the first thing that this point might seem a little bit pedantic, but there'd be a few reasons I'd be already hesitant without knowing any other details about this VPN and, you know, just looking at the fact, the text here. Let me zoom out because it could be, OK, that was unfair. That was just a zoom thing. But basically, I did have a point about their website. So you have unlimited bandwidth that obviously should be unlimited. No register required. I would say no registration worldwide needs to have a gap in it. No log or track. So the English is poor. It doesn't have its own website. It's Thunder.freeSignal.com and have a look at this. The next to the copy right, the email address if we hover over is a signallab07 at gmail.com. So personally, I wouldn't entrust my I would stop here basically if I was actually looking at buying this. I would not trust my data to a VPN company that looks like it's got a free logo and I mean, it might not be free, but that looks blurry and pixelated. I mean, have a look at the quality there. It's got spelling errors on its website. So it is only for Android. So this is a different company, SignalLab. It's only Android. Let me actually just make sure just to compare these things and just to take a look at this Chrome tool as well, because I reckon they're all different. This is by SignalLab and this is by New Keen Technology Limited. So they're different, not related Thunder VPNs. And this is by Advice for PC. That does look like the same thing. OK, so they have a Chrome Web Store thing as well there, but they don't have a Windows client. It's in a proper client. So the one I'm taking a look at in any event is just the Android. So before I do anything, and I just to be clear, this is a Ubuntu Linux computer and I want to be taking a look at the Android client. So I'm using this tool here is called Jenny Motion. It's just an Android emulator, but I always like to just make sure when I'm doing these tests, just to make sure that everything is working all right before I even begin. So this is my internet connection. As I expected, it's showing 90 megabits per second. So I have an asymmetrical internet connection here. I typically guess 90 to 95 on the downlink and about one or two, unfortunately, only one or two on the uplink. There is no symmetrical internet in my area. But just before again, so 90 is what I'm getting here. And I just want to make sure that in my emulator, I get something and I'm using the same internet speed test measurements device fast.com. So we're getting, you know, you can expect a small bit of variance, you know, I've started this test a few seconds after the first one. So one megabit per second in the difference, 1991. So I think we can call that a fair and successful cross check. Okay, so looking at Thunder VPN, it's pretty bare-boned firstly. So when I undock the window menu, I can see, I like to go through everything just to see, get a feel for it. So I did subscribe for the process of this test to their weekly plan. So if I click onto my VIP account, the illustrious VIP account, I can see my order. And I paid, as you can see here, 22. And that weird symbol here is the, is Rady Shackles. So that's my local currency. So running that into US dollars, that's about $6.50. I think the actual official price for American customers or, you know, customers on the US dollar is about $6.00. So that's the weekly cost. And now their pricing is not listed on their website, but some of these VPN review websites have pricing. So it says, vpnfan.com says one month is 9.99 and you get 12 months for 60. So I'm not sure that I can check when this review was written. Typically the pricing doesn't change that drastically. They're saying a weekly plan is $6.00 at 12 months for 60 and one month for 9.99. Now this just to be transparent, not that I don't know the date, I'm recording this video on the 21st of July. So this is the pricing as of this time. So let us go back to our VPN over here. So that's almost a cost. So that's not $9 a month or 10 bucks a month really. It's not really that cheap. It's not vastly expensive, but when you're comparing that to a lot better known VPNs, it doesn't really have a cost advantage. The weekly thing is nice, it's a bit more flexible. So getting back to the menu here, there's one page of settings and the thing to say about this is that there is no kill switch. So there isn't a kill switch for the whole application, a kill switch meaning that when the VPN is disconnected that will actually disconnect network traffic for the Android device doesn't exist. There is no global kill switch, no application kill switch. There's really pretty much nothing here. You can choose to have the VPN connect to a server when the VPN itself starts. That's the first option here that we can toggle on and off. Notify when there's a new version, notifications. It does give you one notification and that's the, I'll see it when the VPN is connected but pretty much nothing in terms of options. There is an FAQ page and this is actually revealing. So conspicuously absent from the settings page was any mention of the protocol, what protocol that this VPN uses to connect. So the first FAQ here is written again in Garbled English with chaotic punctuation. Sorry for being such a grammar snob but that again would really dent my confidence. How to connect you, do the connect button. Why does it fail? Why does it fail? Why does Thunder VPN fail to connect? How can I close? So there's no mention of directly mentioning a protocol until we get to this final FAQ. How can Thunder VPN protect my data? And it says here we use SSL to encrypt your internet data. So basically this appears to, so please feel safe. So this actually appears to me. So let's just leave that question unanswered but it certainly doesn't have a, you don't have a choice of protocols and that's how it's connecting its traffic. So how you pick a server? So once you subscribe for their premium plans, you get, these are the free servers. So you have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Nine free servers and you have this nice auto selecting that'll automatically connect to the fastest server and it looks like it's picked the Netherlands here because I am a flag wizard. So let's just quickly take a look at what we get through the Netherlands server. And bear in mind that this is what it automatically selected as its fastest server in the network. So far, not very good. That's very strange because I have actually got some better speeds on this. That's pathetic. 1.9 megabits per second. I don't think it's gonna budge beyond that. So that was an impressive. I'm just verifying we are connected here. Let's try. So I did have some better success. So there's nine free servers. And when you go onto that, when you upgrade to premium you get, I counted 17, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. 11 from Italy, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Now the stronger servers, it has this little bar indication. So you can see Germany's up there on top. Let's give Ireland to try. And our kind of weird guy is doing his thing and looking happier about his life now. So let's go back to fast.com. 1.8 is what, sorry, what the server in, what I called its best server in the Netherlands came out to. So that's pretty terrible. So let's try Ireland now. Yeah, this is not looking good. So this is actually quite strange. Here we go. Picking up a small bit. So all right, this is looking better. So we're now up to 14 megabits per second, 15. And it looks like to me. So this is kind of the best speed I've actually got through their servers, 15 for the best ones. And I got that from a couple of connection points. So all this testing business is going on. I'm just gonna quickly put YouTube onto my emulator and just to demonstrate, I always like to see how video content fairs through the various VPN endpoints. Okay, so it did not have success. There is Google Play is throwing up an error. So I've just opened YouTube in my Google Chrome browser here. So Ireland was about 15. Now that's well and good. I mean just about well and good. But let me show these speeds on the US servers. So there's two US servers, US West and US East. So I'm gonna try US East first. Now we are connected. So let's go again back to our fast.com, our fast app I should say, powered by Netflix. And let's take a look at the speed we're getting here. So actually this is better than the last time. It's very, very finicky these servers, which makes me think there might be some, even some throttling going on. So I got actually only two the last time. This time I came up to 15 megabits per second and just to show what YouTube looks like. So I've just opened the mobile version of YouTube and just to quickly show that I am still connected to the US server here. I always just do a quick check just to make sure I'm still getting targeted advertisements based on where my Google account is registered in, but I can see that it's more a US centric offering. So this is 15 and I have the audio coming through my headset here and it's usable. But the quality here is automatically scaled down to 360p. So let me just force it up to 720. We still don't actually get any lagging. So obviously I'm just looking at this within the emulator but and you can see that the, you can see the buffering if I just bring this over here, you can see the buffering taking place here. It doesn't look too bad to me. So you can definitely use this connection. So the US connection works. The connection speed on average as you know, as I said in the region of I have got a couple of really bad times, 1.2. Let me just try the other US server before wrapping up here. Let's try US West and let's just see what we get again through the testing on fast.com. You can see Ashburn US is the, was the connection point over here for the US East. Seattle US, that makes sense for US West. And again, we're getting about 10 to 15 in that kind of category here over here. So let's just go back to their end points. So we have the UK, two US servers, Germany, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Italy, Finland, Canada, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. So Australia is showing as a, it's now showing, by the way, when I was trying this the last time I got about at least four of these were two star servers. So let's just quickly to wrap up the speed test, see what a weaker server looks like. This was the only server in our list here that was getting the Australia server getting two bars only. So let me just go back to fast. So you can see there are really problematic servers in their network. So this is clearly not even getting up to one megabit per second on the download speed. So that would be really tough. 1.3, I think it's gonna top out at about 1.3 or there. So let's just go back to YouTube now that it's moved on to the Australian endpoint. And you can see now we're getting some ABC news Australia content. Let's just try to watch this video from Sky News Australia. And you'd be surprised, it's scaled down to 480 and it's not gonna actually give me any options above 480. But a 480 YouTube is workable. So it's actually pretty hard on a, even on a really bad connection to get, to have content so so that it's streamable, but certainly there are, as you can see, limitations. So the final thing I would say about this Thunder VPN is going through the menu, I didn't see any option for support. So we went through the FAQ page. We went through the very, very minimalist settings page there's a share option. There is a feedback screen, which kind of looks like support, but it's not exactly clear what that does in your email. And again, it just kind of looks a bit amateurish. This is all in Capitals. Server is full slash sleepy. I have no idea what a sleepy server means. And rados. So that's basically my concluding thoughts about Thunder VPN would be that, if you're gonna be spending 10 bucks a month on an Android VPN that you can get a better quality product, you can get a product firstly with a wider server network. You can definitely get better speeds. So we plummeted from 90 to about 15 on our top speed and our lowest connections were, the region of one megabit per second. And again, I have got one megabit per second through the US server. So it seems to me that the server network is not particularly stable. I'm just seeing if there's any, if I do a refresh here, if there's any change in the bar ratings for the servers. Let's just have a quick look. Okay, this is taking a while to low taking surprisingly. You can see there was a few that were in the two category, Japan says Korea and Australia, they've sped up. So I would say kind of just too much change in terms of the server, not transparent about the protocol used, certainly no selection about the protocol used, relatively small server network, relatively slow speeds on some servers, no clear help resource out there. So my feelings would really be that as I said, for $10 a month on an Android VPN, you could get a better quality product. So I hope this test run through of Thunder VPN has been of interest and look forward to bringing some more VPN and technology product reviews onto YouTube soon.