After the COVID pandemic, chances are you are one of the many people familiar with VPN technology. Most possibly, you had to connect to your office network with its help at some point. Secure access to internal networks from across the globe is indeed the reason why VPN was invented in the first place.
Companies impose chosen VPN solutions on their employees, but quite a lot of netizens use VPNs privately, too. Most times, it means subscribing to one of the many VPN providers like tuxlerVPN. Here we provide a brief review of its features.
TuxlerVPN features in a flash
The company behind this service is Tuxler Privacy Technologies, Inc. Here are the crucial features of the VPN:
- Security – claims to be military-grade. To be specific, the applied ciphering algorithm is AES-256 (for symmetrical encryption). It’s considered very secure if correctly implemented.
- The number of locations – as TuxlerVPN proudly claims, it offers an impressive 70,000 IPs (refreshed monthly) from 182 providers located in 92 countries.
- Platform support – there are solutions for Windows and macOS, as well as browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Apart from that, soon TuxlerVPN application for Android is coming.
- Connection speed – not described by the provider and rather unpredictable, depending on the chosen server. The premium version is said to be 4x faster, but the vendor doesn’t present measurement data to back this up.
- App user experience – friendly and simple. The main UI panel contains a few configurations, namely: ON/OFF switch, location choice, and data center/residential switch. Download and installation are as easy as it gets.
- The protocol applied is SOCKS5, more typical in proxies than VPNs. The probable explanation is that the authors wanted it to be light enough to support the residential VPN. So, TuxlerVPN could be called a proxy made into and working as a VPN.
A few words about residential TuxlerVPN
A regular, data center VPN relies on a high-capacity server with multiple users connected to it. It serves as a gateway for all of them. A residential VPN employs a different architecture. It has no central point. Instead, users connect via someone else’s connection. Everyone agrees to share his/her IP address in the common pool for somebody to use. Everyone stays anonymous because no one knows exactly who the user is and who the gateway is. Typically, the latter is just a house’s IP, hence the name ‘residential’.
The benefit? There are as many locations to choose from as there are users connected. In the case of TuxlerVPN, it reaches 300,000! The exact amount is obviously changing dynamically, as anyone is free to disconnect at any time. Which brings us to the disadvantage. The IP you got assigned with can suddenly fall out of the pool. Luckily, you don’t get disconnected, but instead automatically switched to another nearby location. This may result in a less stable connection than with a data center VPN, impeding your browsing experience.
How much is TuxlerVPN?
This is possibly the top asset of this provider: it’s free. No time limit, no obligation to buy the premium, and no registration required. TuxlerVPN is truly free. There is, naturally, the premium version for $7.99 monthly as the only billing plan. There are two payment options, via PayPal or CoinPayments.
TuxlerVPN – summing up
The shortest opinion is: TuxlerVPN is worth giving a shot. On the bright side, it’s free to use – a rare asset among the competition. It’s also trivially easy to handle, which is an advantage for anyone who doesn’t wish to meddle with any configuration. The free edition requires no registration and the premium can be paid with cryptocurrency. This can make any user anonymous, even to Tuxler – often the point of getting a VPN. And the number of locations to pick from is very decent.
To be fair, there are also downsides. Connection speeds could be disappointing. They depend on your and server’s locations, so you’re better off testing for yourself. There is no information regarding the logging policy, either. TuxlerVPN doesn’t disclose how much of its users’ activity gets monitored.