Pros & Cons
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- Affordable.
- Easy to use.
- Don't need to know which server to connect to.
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- Complicated pricing.
- Installation process not well thought out.
- Servers are limited.
- Auto-detecting blocked sites is erratic.
- Slow speeds when connected to UK and Swiss servers
OkayFreedom VPN Specs
| OS Compatibility: | Windows 7 |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
| Tech Support: | http://support.steganos.com |
| Type: | Personal |
OkayFreedom from German company Steganos is an easy-to-use VPN service that hides your online activity from eavesdroppers, secures data being transmitted, and allows you to spoof your IP address to view content that is restricted to a certain geographic location. The VPN technology ensures all traffic is encrypted and not visible to third-parties even when the user is on an open network, such as the wireless network at a coffee shop, hotel, or conference center.
OkayFreedom override the IP address assigned by your ISP with one drawn from its own pool of addresses, allowing users to pretend to be connecting from a different location. This is quite handy for a business user required to keep the company's Facebook and Twitter accounts up-to-date but is traveling in a country where the sites are blocked. This applies to other sites that may be restricted to certain geographies.
For example, if a user in the United States wanted to watch a livestream from the London 2012 Olympic Games, that user was out of luck because regional restrictions prevented the user from accessing sites outside of the US. With OkayFreedom, users could change their IP addresses to appear to come from a different region in order to view the games online.
When shopping for a VPN service, users have several choices, some of which we've reviewed.
OkayFreedom comes in three flavors: basic, premium and premium "flat." Regardless of which version is installed, the user has the same level of security, privacy, ease of use and customer support. The only difference is the bandwidth cap, at 500MB per month for basic users and 5GB per month for premium users. Premium flat users have no bandwidth limits.
Pricing is a little complicated. OkayFreedom is free for users up to 500MB per month. To get more, users can pay for premium access, which is $5.95 per month for 5GB, or invite up to five more people to use the service and receive an additional 100MB per user. Premium users can also invite up to five more people, to get 500MB per user to reach the bandwidth cap of 10GB per month. It might just be easier to pay for the premium flat service for $11.95 per month and not worry about bandwidth restrictions. That's actually a pretty good deal compared to some of the other services on the market. Unlike HotSpot Shield, OkayFreedom does not display any ads on its free version. It offers more bandwidth than proXPN, making it a more appealing product, pricewise. Bulk pricing also kicks in for annual subscriptions, as opposed to going month-to-month.
Wonky Installation Process
Installation was a little strange, which is never a great way to start a review. The link on the Website dropped a downloader tool, which I had to execute to get the actual installation file. There was nothing on the site to indicate the first file was just a downloader and not the installer.
The installation itself was familiar. Like Private WiFi, OkayFreedom replaces the actual hardware adapter on the machine with a virtual network adapter provided by OpenVPN (TAP-Win32 Provider V9). OkayFreedom also downloads security certificates at the end of the process, and then displays a page with terms and conditions.
The problem is, the page is in German. Google Translate tells me the top line is "You must accept the terms and conditions to be allowed to use OkayFreedom. Read them carefully and click at the end of the page to 'Accept.' Otherwise, you may not use OkayFreedom." I guessed it was the Terms and Conditions page, and that I would have to hit "Accept" to continue, but not many people would have thought to scroll to the bottom of the page to see the button. They could have easily closed the window, and wondered why the software didn't install.
One of the biggest problems with terms and conditions and privacy policies is that people just hit okay without reading. Having a page in a foreign language without even the option to switch to an English-language page just compounds the problem. I hope Steganos changes this part of installation so that users can at least switch to a different language to see the page, or have language-specific installers.
Auto-Connect
The field of VPN services is an increasingly crowded one, but Steganos offers an auto-connect feature that is unusual. OkayFreedom relies on a Chrome extension or a Firefox add-on to detect when a user is accessing a geographically restricted site. At this point, the VPN service automatically sets up a connection with a VPN server in the appropriate region to give users the necessary geographic identity to proceed.
I had the Chrome extension installed, but I was unable to see the software kick in automatically when trying to access the BBC's iPlayer to view the livestreams for the Olympics. I managed to get switchover to view iPlayer to work under Firefox, though, but couldn't replicate on other sites consistently.
Surfing Securely
Once installed, the Steganos VPN adapter appears under network settings and the software launches—but does not connect to a server—automatically. I have to connect to a regional "identity" to connect to a server, which is indicated by the icon changing to the country's flag. It takes about 20 seconds to 35 seconds to successfully connect. If the server did not respond, I saw an error message.
OkayFreedom groups all servers in a geographic area into an identity. The choices are German, American, Swiss, and British. Unlike other products, the user doesn't see specific cities and servers. When it's time to connect, the software goes through the pool of available of servers and finds one to connect to. This allows Steganos to add new servers without disrupting the user experience. At the moment, the American identity is restricted to only servers in Missouri, and looked like it was connecting to the same ISP in London, UK; Karlsruhe, Germany; and Solothurn, Switzerland. The company has plans to add more servers, a Steganos spokesperson said.
For other competitor products, if a server is not responding for whatever reason, I could just switch to a different city. I can't really do that with OkayFreedom since all I see is the country. If a server in Germany is not responding, I can't just switch to another city and try again. I just have to keep trying the identity until the software finds one in the pool that works.
Security Concern
The menu's help option opens up a website, except it triggered an exception on my Chrome Web browser because the SSL certificate was misconfigured on the Web server. The Help menu attempts to go to okayfreedom.com over a HTTPS connection, but the SSL certificate is for *.steganos.com. Chrome blocks the site from loading because this is how malicious sites can hijack user sessions.
Considering that Steganos is well known for its security products, including a password manager, file encryption, and secure file transfer, this kind of a basic misstep seems out of character.
Speed and Performance
I didn’t notice any discernible lag with OkayFreedom while watching videos on YouTube, watching a live Webcast on UStream, or listening to music on Pandora Radio. To measure network speed, I used the speed tests available on SpeedTest.net. The tests are designed to measure download and upload speeds when connecting to servers in different cities. I determined my location by looking up the IP address and then looked for a city closest to that location to run the test. I ran the test twice with the VPN service turned off, twice with the service turned on, and picked the best measurements. The figures below are over a wired connection, not wireless.
The results were eye-popping. Steganos has clearly put in the effort to make sure the VPN connection doesn't take a hit in Germany or the United States, but the performance was dismal when trying to connect to UK and Swiss sites. I was surprised to see that the VPN performance under the US identity was better than my normal performance. I've observed this kind of boost only with AnchorFree's Hotspot Shield before.
Compared to the other services, OkayFreedom has a bigger performance hit on downloads and uploads, but that may just be because of the dismal performance on the part of the UK and Swiss servers.
Is a VPN Service Worth It?
Steganos' OkayFreedom does the job it's designed to do, which is to give users access to different IP addresses in other regions to hide their online activity. There appears to be a performance boost for American servers, which is particularly welcome for overseas users trying to get to US servers. German users will also likewise have a good experience, but for users looking to get to the British or Swiss servers, it is unacceptable. With the erratic performance results and our difficulty in getting the auto-connect feature to work, OkayFreedom is not yet quite up to par with some of its competitors. Some of the security missteps didn't help its score, either.
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Final Thoughts
OkayFreedom VPN
OkayFreedom is an excellent product for users boosting their signal in the United States and Germany, but the performance hit for accessing UK and Swiss sites is abysmal. The auto-connect feature doesn't always work. There are plenty of other options on the market, both free and paid.