Troid VPN Review

Researching for our review of Troid VPN found that it is one of the Andriod VPN apps offered by TunnelGuru.  TunnelGuru VPN has been in the Internet privacy business for about five years and Troid VPN was first introduced in September of 2013. TroidVPN is a VPN proxy tool.   Employing it will help protect your online privacy, secure your traffic, and obscure your location while browsing the Internet on an Android device.

Troid VPN Review

Pricing and Special Offers / Free TunnelGuru Android Proxy

Troid VPN is a free app and you can get 100 MB of bandwidth per day of VPN service using it.  No registration is required to use the free VPN app.  This is a small amount of bandwidth but might be ok for casual use like checking email.  However, this would be unacceptable for those who use a VPN regularly.  This free service is funded by advertising so you will also have to endure pop-up ads from TunnelGuru VPN and their sponsors while using it.

TunnelGuru VPN

For those who like the Troid VPN Android app, TunnelGuru also offers a paid VPN service which allows you access to all of their servers including the premium ones.   Your subscription will also give you unlimited bandwidth to the Troid VPN network, as well as, let you use all of their custom software to connect your devices to their network.

TunnelGuru VPN Price

They market this service as a single package for $4.25 per month.  At the time of our review, this was the only package they had available.  The features and benefits that the paid TunnelGuru service offers are as follows:

  • Servers – It gives you access to 1 Gbps network of premium servers.
  • Protocols – TunnelGuru offers a choice of UDP, TCP, ICMP, DNS, SSH, and AntiDPI – UDP protocols for data tunneling.
  • Ports – They allow you to choose multiple ports to tunnel through.
  • Proxy – You can set the VPN to utilize a proxy with the TunnelGuru service.
  • Speed – It gives you unlimited speed with no bandwidth limitations.
  • Apps – You can use their Windows client and all four Android apps with their VPN service.
  • Security – It provides a virtual firewall to protect your device thus helping to secure your online privacy.
  • Protection – Troid VPN protects you at your favorite WI-FI hotspot by securing and encrypting all of your mobile traffic.

TroidVPN is one of four TunnelGuru Android apps.  It is the basic client and works with the UDP, TCP, and ICMP protocols.  The other Android apps that TunnelGuru has are as follows: Hammer VPN: AntiDPI VPN; VPN Over HTTP Tunnel: WebTunnel; and VPN Over DNS Tunnel: SlowDNS.  Each has been designed to fill a niche in the VPN landscape and allows them to support a variety of Internet protocols.  Together they provide you with a variety of different tunnels which you can use to connect to their network.

The Android apps will let you tunnel over HTTP(S), DNS, UDP/TCP, ICMP.  The Hammer VPN app even lets you create a VPN tunnel that utilizes Anti-DPI technology to overcome censorship of your traffic by hiding the fact that you a re using a VPN service.   Their Windows software incorporates all of these protocols into an all-in-one client.  This software, when used collectively, will allow almost anyone to use their VPN service.  We will discuss more about these in our TunnelGuru VPN review.

You can pay for your service and receive a monthly voucher by Paypal if you prefer to keep all of your online payments in a central database.  They accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover credit cards which are handled using the anonymous feature of Paypal.  You can also pay for your subscription voucher using Paymentwall.  Finally, you can puchase their VPN service using CashU, Boleto, TrustPay, and a variety of monetary resources that are specific to other countries.  Lastly, you can buy it using a bank transfer.

Risk-Free Trial Period

As we said before, you can use the Troid VPN service free of charge.  You get 100MB of bandwidth per day to test their VPN network.  This should allow you to examine their service and see if you can connect your device to it.

In addition to this they offer a 3-day money back guarantee if you are unhappy with their VPN/Cloud service once you purchase it.  You must notify them in writing via email within your first three days of your subscription that you wish to cancel.  They will refund your purchase price without questions.

Troid VPN Server Network

The Troid VPN network consists of 1 Gbps servers in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States, Singapore, South Africa, and Turkey.  Although this is a small number of VPN locations, it encompasses a wide geographic area.  It provides their VPN service a presence on five of the seven continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.

Their VPN network does not permit the use of Torrents or any other P2P software while using their service.  They also do not market their service to be used to bypass geo-restrictions.  Also, you can only access one device at a time using your TunnelGuru VPN account.  Finally, access to their VPN network is not available in Nigeria, Pakistan, Ghana, China, India, Senegal and Syria.

Troid VPN Privacy & Security

We are not sure about the privacy of what you do while using the TunnelGuru service based on their own Privacy and TOS policies.  It is ambiguous at best.  A small except of this follows:

We do our best to protect your privacy by not storing any more details on our servers than technically or legally required — and permitted. In fact, the servers themselves do not keep any logs that could be of interest to anyone but the developers and operators; However we will cooperate with concern authorities to the extend required to protect us from having to take responsibility for your illegal actions if any. This means that we may unveil your account and payment details as well as the source IP address used to register if you violated rules.

For their mobile apps, they state the following:

> Mobile Applications:
We do not read, track and collect any information or any personal sensitive data via Mobile applications you use in your mobile devices. It just need minimum permissions to work, mentioned in the permission list, can be checked while you install mobile apps. Mobile applications mainly need current location, device ID if available, Build information, access permission to Mobile storage and network.

We were able to find out that they log a minimum amount of information from their VPN users:  connection start, connection end, and the IP address used to connect.  Since they imply that they work within the judicial confines of the country they are located in and not one jurisdiction, they could be compelled to monitor a users data in some cases. Further, they imply that they will do so to absolve themselves from any wrong doing on your part.  We leave it to you to make that determination for yourself.

We were able to find out very little about the algorithms used to encrypt your data from the TunnelGuru website.  Our enquired found that they use their own proprietary custom VPN that combines multiple protocols and tunneling technologies. Their VPN utilizes 128-bit encryption strength for Internet traffic.

Technical Support

Support for The Troid VPN service is through email. We sent a few support questions to the staff from TunnelGuru and heard back from then in 1 to 2 days in most cases.  They were helpful with the questions that we posed.  They also have a Twitter and Facebook presence where you can also see issues and ask questions.  We are not sure how long it will take to get a response from these sources as it did not look like they were monitored daily. Finally, they have a few YouTube videos to help you sign up for their service.  They have no online database of questions and answers that we could locate and many of the advanced features of their VPN are designed for those with more technical experience.

Troid VPN Review: Installation and Use

Before you can sign up for a paid subscription voucher to the TunnelGuru VPN service, you must first create an account.  From the TunnelGuru VPN homepage click on the “Registration” link.  This will open the registration page where you create your account.

Creating a TunnelGuru Account

To register an account, enter a “User name”, “Valid email”, “Country” and the code to verify that you are not a bot.  Then click the “Register” button. It will then ask you to like them on Facebook to get the latest download.  The staff from TunnelGuru will then send you an email to the address that you supplied that will contain your account password to sign into your account.  Be aware that this is a long numerical sequence and you should copy and paste it when you first sign into your account.  Once you sign in to your account dashboard, you can generate a smaller password if you wish.  We recommend that you do as you will have to manually enter it into the Troid VPN app to verify your account.

Troid VPN Android App

Installation

After you have created your TunnelGuru account, you can download and install the Troid VPN software to your Android device.  First select the “Free download” from the site main menu.

Aceess Downloads Page

Next then tap on the icon for Android.   This will open open the GooglePlay page that shows all of the TunnelGuru Android apps.

TunnelGuru Android Apps on GooglePlay

Select the one you want from here to open its installation page on GooglePlay.  Tap on the “Installation” button to install the app to your Android device.  You must review and then tap on the “Accept” button for the permissions that the app needs before the installation process will proceed.  Once the app has finished installing, tap on the “Open” button to run it for the first time.

Troid VPN Installation

Droid VPN in Action

The Troid VPN app will open for the first time with the free user ID and password.  If you created a TunnelGuru account and subscribed to the service, change these to your account username and password to access the premium network servers.  Else you can start your daily 100MB of VPN usage.  However, this will only give you access to the free VPN servers, and you will see advertising popups when you connect and disconnect from the network or leave the app and open the Internet.  The following image shows the main screen, the about screen and the advanced screen for Troid VPN Android app.

Notice the free user ID and password.  One of the free servers is automatically selected on your first login as is the UDP protocol.  Also you will need to remember that you should use Rport: 500 and Lport: 0 with UDP and this is what is selected by default when you first log in.  However, if these are changed for another type of connection you will need to manually change them back.  These settings should be good for most of your connections.  The remember me box is checked by default and you should leave it that way unless you want to manually enter your credentials every time you log in to the TunnelGuru network.  Tapping the down arrow beside your current server will allow you to choose a different one.

Troid VPN Dashboard and Features

The about screen shows that Troid VPN supports UDP, TCP, and ICMP tunnels.  You can change this by tapping on the down arrow beside your current protocol selection.  It also informs you where to get the VPN for DNS tunnels and the Windows client.  The Advanced screen lets you choose a DNS server to use for queries and set up a proxy for your TCP connection if you have one.  In order to use the ICMP setting, you must have a rooted device and access to the “Superuser” account.

When you have the server that you want to connect and the protocol selected, simply tap the “Connect” button.  The first time that you connect to the TroidVPN network, you will have to allow it permission to set up a VPN.  Next it will inform you in strict terms that Torrent applications are prohibited and warn you of the consequences of using them.  Torrent use will get you permanently banned.  After agreeing to this, you will be connected to a VPN server.

First Time Troid VPN Connected

Now, let us take a look at everyday usage for the Troid VPN Android app.  As you can see we are now using a paid Premium account and have entered our verification credentials so that we can use the premium servers.  We have selected a server call “Premium-USA1”, which is a US server that allows connection by UDP and ICMP.   Since we are using UDP, Rport is set to 500 and Lport is 0 which signifies random.  Simply tap the “Connect” button and after a small time you will see the second screen.

This screen shows the server you are connected to, your session time, and the upload and download bandwidth that you have used in this session.  To disconnect from your current server and connect to another one, just tap the “Disconnect” button.  The app will prompt you to disconnect. Tap “OK” and you will be returned to the dashboard screen where you can then choose another server to connect to.

Troid VPN in Use

As you can see, the Troid VPN app makes it easy for you to connect to their network.  Most users will just use the preset UPD setting for their connections.  Since this is the default setup, just a few taps is all it takes to connect or disconnect from your chosen server.  For those with more technical experience they have DNS and proxy settings that you can take advantage of using the TCP protocol.  Finally for the more adventurous with rooted devices, you can use ICMP to tunnel your Internet traffic.

Troid VPN Speed Test

Since the Troid VPN service has both free and premium servers, we decided to see how they compare in speed vs. having no VPN in use.  These are the results using the mobile app.  The results, from left to right are no VPN, premium VPN, and free VPN.  You will notice that their was moderate speed loss due to the VPN itself.  This is due to the overhead incurred by encrypting all of your Internet traffic.  Also, you can see that in our case speed loss was more severe for the free VPN service.  This is usually due primarily to the sheer volume of users on free VPN servers and usually varies throughout the day.   From our previous experience, these are the kind of results that we expected.

Troid VPN Speed Test

In a more quantitative form, our speed dropped from 29.53 Mbps to 21.74 Mbps when using the Troid VPN server.  This is a decrease of about 26.3 percent to a server in Tucker, GA.  Note, 21.74 Mbps is still fast enough for most of you Internet surfing needs.  Plus, having the extra privacy and security will provide you with peace of mind.  The free VPN server dropped our base ISP speed from 29.53 Mbps to 6.82 Mbps.  This is a drop of almost 80%.  This coupled with its 100 MB daily limitation shows that it may not be the best choice for power VPN users.  As always you should get the best VPN you can afford.

Troid VPN Review:  Conclusions

Troid VPN is a free Android app provided by TunnelGuru which will allow your mobile device to connect to their network.  They will provide you with 100 MB per day of free bandwidth on the VPN network.  This will allow you to use their service for casual purposes like checking email.  TunnelGuru also offers a paid premium VPN service that will let you use all of their custom apps (including Troid VPN) and their Windows client without bandwidth limitations.  It will also give you access to their premium VPN servers.

The Troid VPN network consist of servers on five of the seven continents: North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.  They have 1 Gbps servers in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands,  the United States, Singapore,  South Africa, and Turkey.  They use a proprietary VPN that uses 128-bit strength encryption.  Support is primarily through email.  They also have a social media presence on Twitter and Facebook.  You will need to examine their TOS and Privacy Policy for yourself to see if these are acceptable to you.

What we liked most about the service:

  • They have custom software for Windows.
  • Tunnelguru has apps for Android devices.
  • They offer 100 MB of daily free VPN service.
  • An additional 3-day money back guarantee once you subscribe to the service.
  • Multiple ways to purchase a premium VPN subscription which include cryto-currencies like Bitcoin.

Ideas to improve the service:

  • Add tutorials for the features of their Troid VPN and other custom software.
  • More bandwidth for free users
  • Faster servers for free users
  • Allow more that one simultaneous connection.
  • Add more VPN locations.

You can use their free service to test the service to see if it will work for your devices.  Additionally, they offer a 3-day money back guarantee once you sign up for a paid subscription to their premium service.  So, go ahead and test it out for yourself.  If you think it can suit your VPN needs, you can subscribe to it for $4.25 a month.

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A VPN service will help protect your online privacy and unblock sites from around the world. We support a free and open Internet.
troid-vpn-reviewResearching for our review of Troid VPN found that it is one of the Andriod VPN apps offered by TunnelGuru.  TunnelGuru VPN has been in the Internet privacy business for about five years and Troid VPN was first introduced in September of 2013. TroidVPN...