Avira Phantom Review

Avira Phantom offers a free VPN service, as well as, a paid one which is called Phantom VPN Pro. It is sold in two different term length packages, monthly and yearly. One month of their VPN cost $9.99. Like most providers, they offer a discount on their longer term package. This means you can get a year of their service for 35% off the monthly price or $78.00. This works out to just $6.50 per month. Avira offers a 30-day money back guarantee for their paid subscribers. Speed tests were decent, but there is not a large number of server.

What we like

• Very easy to set up and use. In fact, it requires virtually zero configuration, just select a country and connect.
• Offers a 30-day money back guarantee for their paid subscribers.
• Decent speed tests.

What we don't like

• No ping test available.
• Diagnostic data collection on by default. Would prefer if this was opt-in rather than opt-out.
• Installs the Avira management console.
• Not a large number of servers.

Speed

The performance of the service was good. The results indicate that its network speed is acceptable for most applications. There was some loss of speed when using their service. This is to be expected because of the extra overhead incurred by encrypting all of your Internet traffic.

The speed test shows that the encrypted connection lowered our base ISP download speed from 28.23 Mb/s to 24.10 Mb/s. This is a drop of about 14.6%. However, this is a fair tradeoff for the extra anonymity and security that the Phantom VPN service can provide.

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Privacy

Avira has a no-logging policy when it comes to how you use their Phantom VPN service. When asked, “What do you track?” They stated the following -- “Let us start by saying that we do not track: The websites you visit, the virtual locations (IP addresses) you used while surfing, your real IP address, and any information that can link you to any action, such as downloading a file,or visiting a particular website.” They do keep track of some diagnostic data but you can opt out of this if you wish by turning it off in the interface. Additionally, they track whether you are a free or paid user and how much bandwidth you consume. These statements show that your privacy is respected while using their VPN network.

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Servers

The size of the current Phantom VPN network is small. It contains just 20 server locations but as it is only about a year old, so it is likely still expanding. Current locations include the following countries: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Even though their network is small, it does have locations in Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, and South America. They have VPN servers in most popular countries. These include Canada, Brazil, Germany, France, Australia, the US, and the UK.