Choosing a reliable VPN that has the features that you want is important if you’re spending money on purchasing a VPN licence. Your personal assessment of if a VPN is good or not will vary depending on what you want it for and what features it has. AVG Secure VPN has some decent core feature that will make it suitable for some, but not much that really stands out.
Small Selection of Servers
AVG Secure VPN only offers 50 VPN servers across a range of 36 countries. This is a very limited selection when compared to other VPN providers who can have thousands of servers in over 50 countries.
Although AVG can currently unblock access to Netflix’s US catalogue, the three US and one UK based servers suitable for streaming are likely to be blocked at some point. The lack of large server pool makes it difficult for AVG to continuously stay ahead of Netflix’s anti-VPN blacklist.
Similarly, while there are servers specifically designed to support P2P traffic such as torrenting, there are only eight servers available and all of them are either in the US or Europe. This means that any users outside of these two regions are unlikely to get a good quality P2P service.
Privacy and Security
AVG claims on its product page that its VPN will keep your activity private, but they never specifically claim that they don’t log any data. According to the privacy policy, AVG logs: timestamps, the subnet of your home IP address, the IP address of the VPN server you connect to and the amount of data transmitted.
Tip: The subnet of your home IP address means that it doesn’t store the full IP address that could identify you. The last quarter of the IP address is not stored. This is equivalent to knowing which city or street you live on, but not your house number.
The stated purposes for this information logging is: to manage the number of concurrent sessions and handle abuse, to identify if certain regions have higher usage than others, to troubleshoot the service, and to plan for new network capacity, respectively.
There are other less log heavy and potentially identifying ways to get similar information. The 30-day log retention period also seems to be unnecessarily long.
In terms of security, AVG offers the use of the best available 256-bit AES encryption algorithm and the strong and reliable OpenVPN protocol.
Free Trial and Cost
AVG offers a decent 7-day free trial program that allows potential customers to try the full service before putting down any money.
Paid licences either cost $4.99 a month if you purchase a one-year licence or $3.99 a month if you purchase a two- or three- year licence. All licences cover up to five simultaneous devices, are billed upfront, and come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
The cost isn’t unreasonably high, however, there are other similarly priced and cheaper services that offer more features.
Extra Features
AVG Secure VPN does currently unblock Netflix US and UK, although this may change given the small server pool as discussed above.
P2P traffic is supported on three US-based and five Europe-based servers, so torrenting is an option for users.
AVG doesn’t offer some options that its competitors have, such as a VPN kill switch, double VPN, built-in ad blocker, or a dedicated IP.
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