Private Internet Access (PIA) had a couple of important news to share this past week — first, it announced the expansion of its VPN network with what it refers to as a new VPN Network Expansion Plan. And second, it made the new WireGuard protocol out of beta and available in all of its apps. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
New servers in the PIA network
As is standard in the PIA network, these dedicated, bare-metal VPN servers utilize 10Gbit connections to premium transit carriers to ensure world-class connectivity and are only used by Private Internet Access. Private Internet Access takes the security of its VPN server network very seriously and will never allow other VPN services or any other services to run on the same servers. Additionally, all of its servers are on the ground in their reported locations — and are not virtualized servers that are faking their location.
The ten new countries that now have VPN servers ready include:
- Albania
- Bosnia
- Bulgaria
- Estonia
- Greece
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Moldova
- Serbia
- Slovakia
Private Internet Access is constantly monitoring for changes in laws that might make these locations nonviable for no logging VPN servers as has happened previously to its now-shuttered Brazil, South Korea, and Russia server locations. Additionally, the company continually evaluates its choices for data center partners and will seek new partners if they prove to be untrustworthy, as happened with LeaseWeb in Germany.
The WireGuard protocol support
In March, Private Internet Access rolled out WireGuard support to its beta testers on PIA desktop clients and mobile apps. That feature is now out of beta and available to all users — including PIA’s Windows, Mac, Linux desktop clients as well as its Android & iOS mobile apps.
For those who haven’t heard of it, WireGuard is a relatively new VPN protocol that was first released in 2016. WireGuard development follows the UNIX philosophy which simply stated is: Do one thing simply and do it efficiently. As such, WireGuard is less than 4,000 lines of code compared with the decades-old OpenVPN which has over 400,000 lines of code.
WireGuard is open source and released to the entire world under the GPLv2 license. Additionally, WireGuard is officially implemented in the Linux kernel now that it has reached version 1.0. What this means in layman’s terms is that WireGuard will eventually be usable on all Linux distributions because it will come “preinstalled.”
WireGuard is ready to go on all of our 3,381 VPN servers spread across our 61 locations in 41 different countries on the PIA network. To ensure extra privacy, PIA has supplemented the core WireGuard VPN tunneling software with additional protections to ensure that the server-client connection remains private and no IP addresses are leaked.
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And there you have it. Big news for PIA users as well as those looking to get a VPN software. Perhaps now’s the time to go for Private Internet Access. Just sayin’…
Pros
Cons
- Fast, reliable download and upload speeds
- Works great for Netflix and torrenting
- Dedicated Chrome and Firefox extensions
- Connect 10 devices simultaneously
- Doesn't work well in China