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.

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 =)

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)

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.

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.

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.

I’m not a VPN provider.