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Hi all,
I will be in mainland China in January, I am considering signing up to a VPN service, never used one beside from my work laptop before. I will be using mainly iPhone and iPad. Grateful for recommendations that work well with these devices, and prefer a monthly option. Thanks!
Hi all,
I will be in mainland China in January, I am considering signing up to a VPN service, never used one beside from my work laptop before. I will be using mainly iPhone and iPad. Grateful for recommendations that work well with these devices, and prefer a monthly option. Thanks!
I can’t tell you whether it’s the best for quality or value, but NordVPN worked well for us in China last month in that it served its principal purpose, for my wife to watch Strictly and MOTD! A VPN generally won’t work with hotel wifi in China, but is fine with normal data.
I will be in mainland China in January, I am considering signing up to a VPN service, never used one beside from my work laptop before. I will be using mainly iPhone and iPad. Grateful for recommendations that work well with these devices, and prefer a monthly option. Thanks!
In June/July this past summer, I found LetsVPN to work well (e.g., with hotel Wi-Fi) and offer good value. I think they have apps for both iPhones and iPads.
Things can change quickly on this front though, so it can be wise to have a backup plan (e.g., another VPN or mobile data plan). With this in mind, I usually use a 3 HK eSIM—which routes data out of mainland China—with mainland Chinese number add-on (can be helpful when trying to make bookings or place orders in China) and mainland travel data.
I found NordVPN to be excellent for many years, until it wasn’t. I use Surfshark now, though I imagine I’ll have to find another at some point in the future.
The issue as far as I can tell is that there seems to be a constant game of cat-and-mouse between the VPNs and the content providers and networks, and I suspect the quality of any given VPN depends on how much resource they’re putting into fighting that battle – changing their IP address pools etc.
Whichever VPN you use, you’ll probably regularly find that things stop working (e.g. BBC iPlayer refuses to let you watch something it was quite happy to show you yesterday). The solution usually is to refresh your connection (change the server, potentially even the country – although for iPlayer you’ll need to stick to UK). It can be incredibly frustrating, and may take a few refreshes, but persistence usually pays off.
So whichever VPN you go for, choose one that lets you choose the country, and even city, you want to appear to be located in, and gives you control over selection of things like server, IP address, VPN protocol… And has plenty of different servers to choose from – the more the better.
As an aside – Rob, your own site security is a victim of this – or perhaps a little overzealous… 😉 I (anyone else?) regularly get blocked and have to fiddle about with the VPN in order to get HfP to load…
I work on Shanghai a fair bit and need a VPN for betting purposes. Express VPN is highly reliable and will give you a full refund if you cancel within a month, no questions asked.
Heard good things about LetsVPN. You could also take out a Lebara sim card which now comes with free data roaming in China and no VPN will be needed.
I’ve just got a Lebara PAYG SIM for upcoming India trip. Tenner for 20GB
Never got Nord to work. Letsvpn was ok in the summer and I had astrill previously and as a backup but it’s a lot more expensive
Used Airalo eSIM for roaming
Will try Lebara next year!! Ta
Private Internet Access is available using TCB, 28 months for almost nothing after 99.75% rebate. Can’t comment on Asia but it’s worked well everywhere else I’ve used it.
I would strongly encourage you to go the Esim route. 50gb now can be had for so cheap. VPN is increasingly less reliable in China. Windscribe is ok it worked recently but with all traffic masked over port 443 which made it slow. Alternatively setting up a raspberry pi at home with your own VPN or v2mess service is very effective and in the long run much cheaper.
I use my own VPN as @idontfly suggests, though in my case I just configured my home router to do it for me. I have no idea if that’s a common feature but it does have the advantage that the Great Firewall can’t know that it’s a VPN do it is unlikely to be blocked.
Hi all,
I will be in mainland China in January, I am considering signing up to a VPN service, never used one beside from my work laptop before. I will be using mainly iPhone and iPad. Grateful for recommendations that work well with these devices, and prefer a monthly option. Thanks!
I am sure all the above comments are very valid, but I wouldn’t worry too much about VPN anyway. I don’t think there is anything we have ever needed it for other than iPlayer. If you use social media, I guess it’s necessary.
The VPN won’t work with hotel wifi and nor will services like Google, but they work fine on normal 4G/5G. Google Maps works but if walking, it won’t geo-locate you as accurately as normal and if driving doesn’t have access to the traffic data. Apple Maps largely resolves both but has a poor data base of places like restaurants, tourist sites. Didi will locate you very accurately!
The more obscure and less popular the VPN provider, the better the chances of it working and continuing to work longer before inevitably getting shut down / blocked.
Have to agree with @JDB for China, I had 3 VPNs, on hotel wifi they were all problematic. Mobile data through Airalo worked fine, as did all the local services, WeChat, Alipay, DiDi, maps.me also worked well offline.
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