Public Review
Review from Evan on BreakWall
While most users are trying to access information outside of the great wall, I am moving in the opposite direction to get info from inside the great wall.
I setup BreakWall VPN to access websites inside of China, mainly for watching streaming TV stations. One of my family member enjoys watching streaming TV programmes/video from China but realised that it was impossible due to the throttled speed – it keeps “buffering” and stopping. We suspected that either our Singapore ISP (Internet Service Provider) is deliberately throttling the traffic to external overseas sites or that some China media servers streams more slowly to other countries. Regardless of the reason, by connecting to a VPN via Hong Kong, the problem is solved, and streaming TV/videos is fast enough for watching in real-time.
I am impressed with the speed compared to 2 other VPN providers that I have tested in the past. From my measurements, I could get up to around 6Mbps to Hong Kong speedtest.net and around 1.5Mbps to the China websites (e.g. JSTV.com). My ISP claims up to 100Mbps but we all know that it is not true except for inside Singapore. The true speed to overseas is usually up to 10Mbps at best. The 1.5Mbps observed is the streaming speed of the media server that is lower than what the VPN could support (up to around 6Mbps). Other VPN providers I tested in the past sometimes drops below 1Mbps. (probably due to over-subscription – too many users). With those slow speeds, it would be useful for web browsing only and not possible to stream videos. I hope that BreakWall can maintain the excellent performance.
The pricing is reasonable and billing is very fair. We can upgrade or downgrade anytime and the calculation is pro-rated. Allowing up to 3 simultaneous connections instead of just 1 or 2 connections, I could test the VPN on my Android phone and it worked smoothly for several protocols – L2TP, OpenVPN, Cisco IPsec. The people behind this VPN service are knowledgeable and supports most of the VPN technologies out there. It should work on any device from PC, to Android phone to iPads.
I would be happy if there could be some China servers so that I could have an IP address inside of China. This would allow access to YouKu, TuDou, etc that currently bans external IPs including Hong Kong IPs.
Overall, BreakWall is highly recommended for its high performance (not overloaded so far and I hope it will remain so in future), reasonable pricing and fair billing.