NordVPN Named Top VPN for Speed in 2020 AV-TEST Benchmark

A new report from internet security firm AV-TEST has benchmarked several popular Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers and found that NordVPN was the “clear winner” for measured broadband download and upload speeds in three major world regions (UK, Japan and the US west coast). Well.. they did commission the “independent” test.

In case anybody really doesn’t known. A VPN essentially encrypts and routes your internet activity through a different protocol and server (i.e. a private network connection that runs over the public internet). Remote workers often use VPNs to connect with their office network while at home and ordinary consumers may use one too, such as for remote working, remote desktop control, staying anonymous online or for avoiding internet filters (e.g. hotel wifi) and geo-blocking etc.

However, not all VPNs are able to keep up with the speed of your physical broadband ISP connection (assuming you have a good one), which can hamper the end-user experience. Testing this is also particularly difficult because many VPNs will offer you a choice of different servers to connect through and some of those will perform differently from others.

The new study from German firm AV-TEST sought to try and answer this by putting several popular Virtual Private Network providers – ExpressVPN, NordVPN, Private Internet Access, PrivateVPN, ProtonVPN, PureVPN and TorGuard – through a battery of different tests in different regions. Sadly, latency wasn’t tested, which is a key metric to consider.

Overall, NordVPN came top in most of the categories, except for average download speeds in the EU, where rival provider Private Internet Access managed to edge ever so slightly ahead with a score of 256.1Mbps (NordVPN got 255.9Mbps). In fairness, most of the VPN providers did well for this one, except ExpressVPN and ProtonVPN that were noticeably slower (150.8Mbps and 146Mbps respectively).

Admittedly we have to caveat that the testing was commissioned by NordVPN and we would have liked to see it look at a wider selection of performance metrics than just speed, such as latency times etc. Just for comparison, Ookla’s speedtest.net service last year handed the award for the 2019 World’s Fastest VPN Provider to Hotspot Shield, which was followed by ExpressVPN, Avira and NordVPN (NordVPN won this too in 2018).