I Just Have A Few Questions.....

[SlipBetween 1]

I have been using AirVPN for a few months now and I am extremely pleased with not only the service itself, but also with what AirVPN stands for.  It's not enough to have super blazing fast speeds or a million available server locations, you also have to be able to TRUST the provider behind said service.

 

Sorry for going off topic a bit. First a little background information, and then on to my questions:

 

My current ISP is Kabel Deutschland/Vodafone.  The plan I'm currently paying for is 100 MB/s down, 6 MB/s up over fiber. My speeds are rock steady morning, noon & night with little to no outages.  Needless to say, I am very pleased with my internet service.  In order to verify these speeds, I run my connection from the cable modem, to a router, to my desktop.  The ports on all three are rated for gigabit speeds and I use CAT 7 ethernet cabling.  Now my questions:

 

1. After much fiddling and trial & error, I have figured out that for a consistently fast connection I have to configure the VPN connection to use either port 80 or 53 (I haven't tried any other alternative ports, as it has not been necessary) instead of the default 443 port.  Speeds on port 443 typically range from 5-12 Mbps down, whereas using port 80/53 gets me 60-90 Mbps down on average.  I test this using the non-flash version of speedtest.net.  Based on your description of these ports in your Configuration Generator, ports 80 & 53 are used when your ISP applies caps or blocks.  Does this imply that my ISP is monitoring my connection and throttling my speeds when it detects the usage of a VPN?  If so, should I be concerned about my ISP "spying" on me, or is this "business as usual" for any ISP?  By their own admission, Kabel Deutschland offers "unlimited" flat rate internet on all of their connection plans and does not cap or throttle speeds.  This is further proven by the fact that I watch several hours of Netflix and/or Amazon Prime Video a day without any speed limitations.  I should also note that I don't using any torrenting software and do not participate in file sharing activities.  
2. I understand that using the "Eddie" client for my VPN connection allows for certain perks, such as, network locking and server monitoring.  When it comes to simply establishing a connection though, is there any difference in using "Eddie" as opposed to something like Viscosity or the OpenVPN GUI client?  I want to make sure that by using one of these other clients, I'm not sacrificing any basic security, privacy or connection stability factors.
3. I noticed under your "How-To" section for using AirVPN under Android, one of the steps is choosing Linux for the configuration file.  Upon further investigation I saw that there is actually a button for Android as well.  Is this simply a matter of the "How-To" section needing an update, or is choosing Linux really necessary for configuring the file to use with Android?  Up to this point I have been using Android to create the config file and only noticed the "How-To" after the fact.

If anybody could help me with these questions, I would greatly appreciate it.  If any more info is needed, don't hesitate to ask.

[LZ1 672]

Hello!

 

Welcome to AirVPN!

 

1. ISPs can naturally see what you're doing. Whether or not they're trying to spy on you depends on your country. But a VPN guards against this. Thus it also wouldn't matter if you were torrenting, as you'd be protected, provided there's no leaks. It's hard to say if you're blocked, throttled or having your traffic shaped, as things can change quite quickly and arbitrarily based on various conditions. If you use SSL for example, then it's simply the overhead from the protocol itself which can cause a slump in speed. There's a project called Glasnost which you can check out, to test ISP traffic shaping if you wish. I'd just be happy to get your speeds though.
2. You can use whichever software you like. But if you don't use Eddie, you have to find other means of enacting Network Lock-like behavior if you want it. Many do this using custom firewall rules like those of pfSense. Eddie is a very good piece of software though, as it's open, has many features, presents things in a good way, doesn't have ads or spyware and so forth. Air naturally can't speak for what others do with the software they manage, so it's largely up to you to find out what you need. There's nothing wrong with not using Eddie though, not at all. Eddie is just an OpenVPN "wrapper", in that it wraps things up in a nicer package .
3. There's a lot of things which need to be updated . Android is Linux-based. It tripped me up too lol.

Ich liebe Deutschland

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

Ich liebe Deutschland

 

Hör auf zu lügen.

 

 

There were a few reports in the past of Kabel DE filtering certain packet types, I just can't find the thread anymore -.-

A year ago I noticed a reduced BitTorrent performance on UDP/443 so I switched to UDP/53 (Deutsche Telekom ). Recently I decided to use all available ports instead, even 443 is working again. Maybe it was not the ISP, after all.. consider your networking equipment as well.

 

If you are using one of those shitty Hitron routers, be adviced, it's a very bad choice.