Using PIA VPN resembles nosebleed in Malaysia and Thailand right now.
It used to be disrupted service over last 15 months, but now is just pure torture.
Automatic connection doesn’t work, reverts back to East US as default, they couldn’t pick worse location, on the opposite side of the globe.
Singapore often goes down, same with Hong Kong. When I connect to India, it sometimes work for few minutes, but not long. Japan and anything further, including Australia and UAE never establishes connection.
Same issues on WiFi and 4G.
Platforms used: macOS and iOS. All updated to latest versions of OS and PIA VPN.
No reply from support after 96 hours (!)
Must also add that service was disrupted multiple times while in UK, when I was there for few months.
Recommendation: AVOID this VPN operator. I am not renewing my subscription, starting to look for alternatives already, as I see their focus is on raising prices, while neglecting customer service.
This sounds like you may be having issues with routing between our servers and you. OpenVPN responds extremely poorly to packet loss, so if there’s a bad hop between our servers and you, you will experience speed issues and disconnects.
The reason that I would point to your ISP or routing as an issue is because the issue seems to impact multiple locations, which means that even when going to completely different data centers with completely different infrastructure, you are experiencing similar intermittent issues.
On the service being disrupted in the UK, did you try to contact support at the time? We have an enormous amount of infrastructure in London due to demand, and any outage or slowdown would cause a huge uproar with our customer service team that we would notice quickly.
If you’re willing to have us assist you, i’m more than willing to help you collect data and get it to customer service for you.
I actually didn’t up or downvote your post. I know how it sucks when things don’t work properly.
You can’t compare “using the same ISPs” when on and off of a VPN. Packet loss is invisible most of the time (places where it isn’t would be visible would be video games, VOIP calls, video chat, but even then you’d to have your connection transit the bad hop on the way to experience issues). Because of how VPNs work, it magnifies the issue.
Hey Delusionist! On the 5 different ISPs and 2 countries, was this using the same device? This could be an issue with the app or the TAP driver. Let me know!
Yeah, ok. So what are you suggesting I should do?
I have changed all setting available for OpenVPN and IPSec, still my connection was often (multiple times per day) working with just Google Docs and being unable to use Gmail. Nothing fancy like the stuff you mentioned.
You are providing very generic response, listing technologies that are often throttled by ISPs. What worries me is the lack of interest from PIA support. Still no indication how to get any help from them. Wondering if there is any support at all…
Few posts by fellow redditer from Malaysia acknowledged disconnections from Singaporean VPN.
I have been holding to post anything here on Reddit for over 4 days. Only after being completely ignored for most of the week, I came to conclusion that such bad experience needs to be shared with others as a warning. Right now it looks that company’s strategy is to suppress bad opinions for the purposes of PR, without actually handling the issue.
To summarise, 4 days of emails to PIA support, few hours since posting on Reddit, still no clear direction where to take the issue and who will help me with this.
Change your attitude for starters. You get the most out of people it you speak and treat them nicely. When I am on support/shop floor and a customer comes up barking abuse and being stroppy I just ignore them and help someone who is being nice. It’s called Karma