When choosing a VPN for Australia, the best idea is to look for a VPN with fast connection to Singapore or the U.S. West Coast. If you connect to a server in Singapore you will avoid the Five Eye countries, and you’ll tend to get reasonably fast connection speeds to the US. You should not connect to Australian servers if you do not want your online activities to be logged.
Here are the best VPNs for Australia:
- ExpressVPN (based in the British Virgin Islands): Good apps available for Mac, Windows and mobile devices. Fast connections around the world (including Singapore). Good customer support. They have a 30 days “no quibble” money-back offer. They accept Paypal, major credit cards and Bitcoin. Two simultaneous connections allowed.
- IPVanish (based in USA): Some people report that IPVanish is also very fast in Australia. IPVanish has 700 servers available in 60 countries. IPVanish offers a “7 Day Free Trial” in the form of a money back guarantee. Allows five simultaneous connections.
Many Australian use VPNs to access Netflix, the BBC Player and various torrent sites.
The Australian Minister for Communications, Malcolm Turnbull, has stated that the use of VPN technology by Australians to circumvent geo-blocking in the US, is not illegal under the Copyright Act. Here is the quote from Turnbull’s website:
While content providers often have in place international commercial arrangements to protect copyright in different countries or regions, which can result in ‘geoblocking’, circumventing this is not illegal under the Copyright Act.
For Australians who are particularly concerned about privacy, and are willing to take a speed hit I recommend: AirVPN (based in Italy) or iVPN (based in Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory).
I’m using PIA (Private Internet Access). It’s cheap and works great.
PIA has applications for most devices and all sorts of support if you want to do your own thing. So not hard to install AT ALL.
Changing countries means your connection is encrypted (via whatever protocol you chose for the VPN) and sent to the country chosen, meaning anyone in between cannot see what you are doing. To have your VPN connect to a datacenter in Australia would be pointless. You would not circumvent any geotracking (obviously) and metadata laws would still apply to the datacenter. Other countries also have mandatory data retention (such as the US, UK and various other countries), so Australian authorities could legally… and using whatever surveillance methods are already in place requisition your data from them. One country that does not have data retention is the Netherlands. So if your VPN connects to the Netherlands you can be fairly sure (never 100% though) that you aren’t leaving a data trail.
Upsides are no tracking, fuck the system and netflix from wherever you please. Downsides are some services will not work (for instance ABC iView) and you will get ads and whatever, targeted to the country where your VPN datacenter resides (youtube ads in another language, youtube recommendations for a different viewership). These are the issues i’ve come across.
If anyone wants the quick run down (if i missed anything let me know…):
So things you should know:
Hola is bad and was a bot net at 1 point, AVOID
Chrome extension VPN’s aren’t magic and will not protect you outside the browser, they have 1 job to hide your chrome browsing so don’t expect them to magically hide your torrents.
IPv6 FTTP NBN connections can leak your computer’s ip if you skimp out on a bad VPN or misconfigure your VPN, make sure you test this with ipleak.com and have a VPN that supports ipv6
Sometimes a thing called WebRTC can leak your computers ip address, there is a chrome extension to disable WebRTC (its used mainly in loading media elements faster), again test with ipleak.com
VPN’s are reliant on the server/tunnel speed (you have no control over this) so expect a drop of download speed while on a VPN, this speed can vary widely based on bottlenecking, shit servers, shit VPN’s etc. Some may never see a noticeable difference (if you have reasonable base speed, but ADSL1 people well…. don’t even try)
VPN’s can be used to bypass annoying geolocation content restriction =)
All over the continent citizens want a VPN for Australia to protect themselves against overreaching new surveillance laws. The above mentioned VPN’s are best for Australia.
I have been using PIA since November of last year but I find that it slows my internet speed down to about one third of what I get when not connected to the VPN and that is with most of their severs.
The best speed I get are when connected to their Australian severs in Sydney or Melbourne.
I have tried all of the settings that they have told me to use to fix this but nothing seems to work.
I am with Telstra Big Pond ADSL2+
You lucky to get 30% I was at approximately 10% no matter which server I accessed on PIA. I’ve a 100Mb/s connection as well so the impact of using PIA was enormous. I’ve simply just given up and gone looking else where after reading the 30 pages of threads on their forum with everyone complaining the same thing. Market is expanding and PIA simply have no responded fast enough to maintain speed by the looks.
So I used to be like you and was getting about 13Mbit/s download speed on the Sydney Server. I have fibre to the home and without VPN get 95Mbit/s down.
So I contacted PIA and they sent me some generic stuff to change settings but to my surprise it actually worked! Basically keep changing your UCP and TCP remote ports until you find one that works the best. It’s super annoying but I found that on TCP 443 was the best for me. I ended up getting 68 Mbit/s. Now that’s much better and is roughly 70% of my Internet speed (loss of 30%).
Hope that helps!
FYI – I use the highest level of encryption, handshake, DNS leakage protection etc.
Thanks for the info, I was tossing up between PIA and TorGuard. Really appreciate the effort you have gone to, it has helped make a clear decision.
I’m in Australia, I have a housemate who is paranoid about security. I’m not quite so freaked out but….She uses UTorrent a bit and would not like to be hassled by the uniformed enforcers of a government gone mad about collecting metadata. Why should i choose you as my VPN provider?
Thanks
JV
I’m not a VPN provider.
Hi
I’m primarily looking for a VPN with the fastest speeds to stream UK based channels. Not fussed with privacy as I’m not using it for torrenting and I don’t really care about DNS leaking. I’m purely interested in fast speeds and low latency.
Thanks.
You may want to use a Smart DNS service instead. Otherwise, I’d use one of the VPN services mentioned in the article.
Since this is Australian VPN list I’d like to vouch for the company I’m using because https://vpnarea.com has 15 Australian servers in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide. All other companies I’ve seen have 1-2 AU servers only or don’t have any.
I also use https://vpnarea.com … It’s fast in OZ (15 ping in Brisbane), works well when traveling overseas (eg USA), and has no trouble streaming Netflix or BBC programs. I haven’t noticed any slowdown in streaming speeds. (I use Telstra cable)