The Company offers the usual vary of instrument clients, together with a preconfigured router, each of which provide you with Get Right Of Entry To to the identical small network of eight places: UK, US, Eire, Germany, Canada, Spain, France and Switzerland.
the liberty Shield website online makes large claims about Efficiency, claiming to provide “superfast Tier 2 community velocity with sophisticated routing to assist be sure zero buffering with video streaming.”
The website additionally suggests Liberty Shield can unblock Netflix amongst many different services that might be geo-blocked because of their vicinity.
We’re within the router, a personalised model of the favored MikroTik Hap ac lite field. This comes with five 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports, dual-chain 802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, single-chain 802.11ac 5GHz Wi-Fi, and a USB port for 3G/4G modems. There’s more element on the MicroTik website online if you need it.
The beginning worth is sexy at simply £29.Ninety Nine ($37.50) which incorporates your selection of energy supply sort (UK, EU, US), free UK transport for the router and one month of VPN Get Right Of Entry To.
Subscription prices are somewhat excessive, although, ranging from £6.Ninety Nine ($8.Seventy Five) per month to an identical £5.83 ($7.30) for the annual plan. Liberty Shield’s VPN Router still appears fairly low cost for The First 12 months, but after that it starts offevolved to seem reasonably pricey.
There Is some compensation in Liberty Shield’s complete UK-primarily based customer Fortify. This Is open from 9am to 9pm, 7 days a week, and contains live chat, email and Make Stronger tickets, and even an solution to schedule a call-back.
We examined the chat service and bought a helpful and pleasant response in lower than a minute. It’s wise to be skeptical of web critiques, however experiences on Trustpilot persistently reward Liberty Defend for its purchaser Make Stronger.
Beef Up truly matters, too, especially with a VPN router where you might add new gadgets at any time. If You’re now not the technical sort, then spending £20 ($27) more a 12 months to assist remedy these issues could seem like a good deal.

Privateness

the liberty Protect web site makes some it sounds as if definitive statements about Privacy, together with: “We never share your information with someone and do not log your website online utilization via our servers in any type.”
There Is some scope for session logging, as the authentic Privacy coverage goes on to give an explanation for:
“…we may acquire the following knowledge: occasions when linked to our provider, number of server area, and the entire quantity of knowledge transferred per day…”
This Can Be A little imprecise, and not ideal, however it’s also now not atypical; many VPN providers do one thing equivalent.
We browsed the rest of the details, too, however didn’t find anything else abnormal. It Can Be the standard stuff: don’t do anything else unlawful, don’t breach copyright, do not be a spammer – you already know the deal. The contracts all gave the impression reasonably straightforward, with no sneaky clauses to catch you out.

Performance

the liberty Protect VPN Router arrives in a shockingly small field, yet it still accommodates the whole lot you need: router, power supply, an extraordinarily short Ethernet cable (around Zero.25m), along with a tiny Fast Start information and a card with an allotted login identify and password.
The set up guide started off well. Plug one end of the router cable into the VPN box, the opposite into your common router, plug within the power cable and look forward to it to connect to the internet. Easy.
Sadly, the information failed to tell us what to do subsequent. Should we look for an SSID and check out to attach? Get Right Of Entry To the router from a browser? Do one thing else? There Have Been no obtrusive clues.
After spending a few minutes exploring our choices, we checked The Online version of the Make Stronger information and noticed the problem. We weren’t missing anything else, it was once the fault of the broadcast setup information, which somehow disregarded essentially the most an important line of all:
“To Start the activation process please talk over with https://www.libertyshield.com/activate and enter the SSID and Code from the entrance web page of your booklet.”
That Is clumsy, however at the least we solved the difficulty quickly. And even though we hadn’t, Liberty Defend’s very good Strengthen is on hand to offer fast options.
We headed off to the activation page, the place a form asked us to enter the login credentials supplied with the router. We also had to offer our name and e-mail address to create a Liberty Shield account, and enter the main points of the cardboard that might be used for fee. (The Primary month is free, and if you happen to cancel your subscription prior to the month is up, you won’t be charged the rest at all.)
Moments after submitting the form, an e-mail arrived reporting that our router was now activated and prepared to be used.
Certain sufficient, the SSID name of the freedom Protect box used to be now seen, and we had been ready to connect to it from a laptop, tablet, Phone and TELEVISION Via coming into our allotted wi-fi password.
With The Aid Of default, our router connected us to a UK VPN server. Which You Could trade this, but it surely takes a bit work. There’s No local router console, so as a substitute you need to go to the freedom Defend web site, log in, select your preferred vicinity and connection means (VPN or Proxy), store the consequences, turn your router off, wait a couple of minutes, flip it on and look forward to it to reconnect.
The Online console deals a number of other connection settings – protocol (PPTP By Way Of default, L2TP as an choice), Wi-Fi SSID and password – however nothing like the ability or configurability you’d get with a standalone router.
We began our Efficiency exams* With The Aid Of the use of a wired connection, hopefully giving us a good suggestion of The Best possible service speeds. Our router was at the start set to use our nearest UK server, and this delivered solid outcomes, with obtain speeds generally starting from 52-58Mbps on a 75Mbps broadband connection. That Is not dangerous in any respect, particularly as the web site suggests the router has a maximum obtain pace of 30-40Mbps.
Switching to wireless connections showed no actual distinction on our Home Windows 10 laptop, which managed to max out its wi-fi adapter at around 44Mbps.
Our cellular noticed a moderately dramatic drop in Efficiency from around 50Mbps when connecting to our common router, to more like 25Mbps when using Liberty Shield. That was once surprising, however as we could not see why, and this isn’t an issue that affected other gadgets, we didn’t rely it as a major black mark towards the product.
Switching our region to Germany noticed speeds fall to round 20-30Mbps on a wired connection, around what we might are expecting from a normal VPN. UK-US connections were inconsistent and quite disappointing, ranging anywhere from 6 to 20Mbps.
VPN routers should not have the same knowledge leak issues as software VPN clients as a result of they are now not operating on top of another software with its own community adapters and settings. We ran our regular Privateness checks anyway, and Certain sufficient they failed to divulge anything to be desirous about.
We rounded off our checks Via seeking to visit a couple of geo-blocked websites, and found Liberty Shield accessed them without problem. There’s No make certain that this example will ultimate, and web sites like Netflix block new VPNs at all times, but at the time of writing, as a minimum, the provider works very smartly.

Final verdict

Liberty Protect VPN Router could work well for novice UK customers who just need to plug in and go, but in addition want quality Reinforce to help them speedy repair any issues. This is not the best possibility for specialists, although, who may be put off By Way Of the small server community, lack of options and configurability, and above average subscription value.