Summary
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Features - 4/104/10
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Speed & Reliability - 5/105/10
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Security & Privacy - 4/104/10
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Usability & Compatibility - 6/106/10
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Support & Documentation - 5/105/10
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Value for Money - 6/106/10
Summary
Boxpn offers a good number of server locations at an affordable price, but the lack of bitcoin payment availability, slow speeds, and rather rudimentary encryption are a serious hit on the overall service quality.
BoxPN is a VPN Provider based in Turkey, claiming to be in the web-hosting business for 15 years.
Features
As far as we found out, BoxPN runs its VPN infrastructure on Windows Servers. For this reason, they provide only Windows-specific VPN protocols: PPTP, L2TP/IPSec and SSTP.
They don’t provide OpenVPN, which is arguably the most common VPN protocol these days. We like OpenVPN and for lacking it, they are getting a lower score in our review. If you are on Linux, your only protocol choice is PPTP, since SSTP is Windows-only and L2TP/IPSec is hard to setup manually.
VPN security features 128 bit encryption for PPTP and 128 bit for L2TP/IPSec by default, using their client software, although L2TP/IPSec is advertised as 256 bit encryption in their client software. But if you connect to L2TP/IPSec manually, setting the connection yourself and enabling “Maximum Strength Encryption”, it will use 256 bit AES.
Same goes for SSTP: advertised to use 2048 bit encryption. Actually, that being the authentication strength not the traffic encryption strength. Traffic is encrypted with a 256 bit cipher. So in our opinion they have to double-check such specifications and provide accurate specs.
Now, back to their infrastructure, they claim to run a 220 Gbps world-wide network. Checking their network status page, we found that there are around 230 servers world-wide, so it means that virtually all servers have 1 Gbps connections. That would be a good feature.
Speaking of network, they have servers on 5 continents, in some of the widely used locations. This is a good thing, since most customers should easily find servers close to their geographic locations.
Software
BoxPN has an easy-to-use VPN client that allows for quick server-switching and VPN protocol selection. The VPN client software is available only for Windows, though they provide step by step tutorials to set up the connections on other operating systems.
Speaking of other operating systems, we found that their tutorials are out of date. For instance, their iOS tutorial is for versions 3, 4 and 5 while the current iOS version is 7. The same applies to their Android tutorials made for versions 2 and 3, while the recent major version is 4.*. However, there aren’t major differences in the VPN setup between older and current versions, so it should be easy to setup the VPN even following out-dated tutorials.
Some important OSes that they don’t provide any tutorials for are Windows 8 and Linux. We also found that their setup tutorials cover only PPTP.
Pricing
BoxPN has 3 pricing plans.
- 3 months: $19.98 or $6.66/month
- 6 months: $29.94 or $4.99/month
- 12 months: $47.88 or $3.99/month
No monthly plan for that matter.
They have a 7-day money back guarantee.
Payment methods: PayPal, Credit Cards, Webmoney and Perfect Money. No BitCoin.
Logging and Privacy
They have a short privacy policy in which they state that they collect network utilization data like IP addresses. But they don’t mention for how long the collected data is stored. No personal details like name and address are required when ordering the VPN service and that’s good.
Here’s a claim from their privacy policy that cought our attention:
When users connect to boxpn Virtual Private Network, no cookies are stored on their system.
It sounds like the firewalls on their VPN servers are blocking cookies. If that’s what they claim and not something we misinterpreted, then it’s absolutely wrong.
Speaking of cookies, we weren’t pleased to notice that their web-site is full of tracking scripts: Adroll, Alexa Metrics, Google AdWords, Google+ and Analytics, Pingdom, Zopim. This ain’t something we like to see coming from a privacy service.
Speed and reliability
Speed was good in P2P tests but not impressive, slower than some competitors we reviewed recently. Browsing speed was also slow and it took several seconds to load some bigger websites. Even speedtest.net was very slow in the initial loading process, before starting the bandwidth test. The best download speed we got was only half of our available broadband speed of 100 Mbps.
Best torrent speed we got was 7 MBps on PPTP, 5 MBps on L2TP/IPSec and 2 MBps on SSTP.
The servers we tested have been reliable, not much to complain about. Some servers we tried to use were under maintenance and we’ve been redirected to others, in different locations. Video streaming on Hulu was smooth, with no hiccups.
Support
They provide support via ticket-system, no live chat or other “delay-free” methods. We opened two tickets asking about a technical issue and they replied quickly, in 5 and 8 minutes.
Conclusions
The good:
- Many servers in many locations.
- An easy to use VPN software for Windows.
- Good pricing.
- P2P allowed in several locations.
- Not asking for personal details when signing up.
- Email support is quick.
The bad:
- No OpenVPN.
- No BitCoin.
- Outdated tutorials, lacking some important ones (Win 8 and Linux). They provide setup instructions only for PPTP but we received L2TP/IPSec instructions by email on request.
- Not so clear privacy policy, site full of tracking scripts.
- Speed is far from what we’d wish for but ok for people with slower broadband (10 Mbps to 60 Mbps)
- SSTP advertised as 2048 bit encryption, L2TP/IPSec as 256 bit (it’s 128 bit with the VPN client software)
Final Notes:
The lack of OpenVPN support, BitCoin, overall slow speeds and a not so clear privacy policy are not to our liking. We feel that BoxPN is not catching up with modern technologies and it really requires some major updates in terms of features. On the bright side, its service pricing is very attractive and the choice of VPN locations stands out. This being said, we give BoxPN a rating of 5/10 and we will gladly re-evaluate our review if they are going to make some necessary improvements.
Been using BoxPN for nearly a year now from a range of countries. It’s OK but just not very reliable.
Boxpn is useless. Frequent disconnection, slow speed, Poor support, no OpenVPN & their site is loaded with logging scripts. So much for your privacy. I will not renew my subscription.
Had been using boxpn for a month to have a national IP when they suddenly stopped providing my country. The support gave misleading replies until they finally admitted they had problems but they would be back “in a week”. This has not happened and they do not answer my questions any more. Big warnining for boxpn, they are dishonest and unreliable.
I have been using Boxpn for nearly 2 years. Their customer service and VPN service has in the past been excellent. However, my advice would be until they return to that excellence and provide some much needed technological updates I would shop for an alternative.
The good part is Boxpn has a great privacy policy and low cost service, but over the last several months I keep getting disconnected from my VPN without any alert or warning and I continue working unknowingly unprotected.
Over the last several months, this disconnect issue has been getting worse with frequent and increasing disconnects that go unreported to you, the user. The Boxpn client is supposed to auto reconnect but that feature has never worked at all. The tech support has contradicted themselves several times in recent email communications with them concerning this issue of disconnecting. Regardless, I paid for a service to protect my connection which it previously did extremely well but now increasingly fails to do.
I had boxpn since a couple of months, the first month was fine, then the speed was very very slow, I think they just limit speed after one month! Support is bad,they just send prewritten replys and then don’t answer at all! The worst is that the german server is actually in Poland! Don’t get boxpn, they suck!
WORST PURCHASE EVER!I tried to contact them because their german servers are in poland, so no german ip!even after 3 month they did not manage to forward my emails to their supervisors. all i get is prewritten replies. The speed is around 0.8 mbit. i changed to a more costy provider where i always get around 20 mbit!
i have open tickets with them, they do not reply anymore, speed is slow,german server is not in germany, i would not recommend them!!!!!!
Started with them in December 2012. Seemed like a great service with good customer support, but in January this year (2014) I have started experiencing a lot of problems. PPTP servers don’t work. Even SSTP servers don’t work and my own IP is showing. I have trouble getting onto blocked sites no matter what SSTP server I try. Customer service has gone very bad and you can waste weeks with back and forth replies and get nowhere. They probably know there’s some major problem, but they’re not admitting it. Is there any wonder BoxPN are not on anyone’s VPN top 5/10/15 lists. Don’t bother.
I started using boxpn in 2013 and it was excellent. As other reviewers have said above, around Dec 2013 things changed significantly for the worse. I signed up for what seemed an excellent value annual subscription, and now, of course, wish I hadn’t. The specific problems I have encountered are:
1) UK connections – I now have to try repeatedly to get a connection and it frequently just isn’t possible on any of their UK servers (which I also think now pool connections in some way – customer service alluded to something of this nature whilst failing to fix my problem or answer my questions). This definitely correlates to time of day, so I suspect they are limiting the number of connections their servers are allowing. If I do get a connection it’s normally just fast enough to stream BBC.
2) Their Swedish server is no longer in Sweden, so it’s no use for accessing Swedish media content. Customer service said this was a temporary problem back in Jan, but it hasn’t been fixed yet.
My conclusion is that this was a good service but probably some new management initiative to increase revenue (get more customers) and decrease costs (reduce server capacity, sack high level staff) appeared at the end of 2013 and this service is now so bad that any brand value it had has long since gone and by the end of 2014, when all those annual subscriptions like mine aren’t renewed, the same management will probably sell this wholesale to some gullible fool (value based on current subscriptions) and the whole thing will have folded and vanished by this time next year whilst management are busy setting up some new service that looks good for just long enough to pull in a new client base, and then repeat as above.
Avoid.
We registered with BoxPN on 29th May 2014 for 1 year VPN service at $35.88, paying with Perfect Money. After a few emails and 1 day delay my VPN service was activated. and it worked OK with the exception of 3 servers not working. That continued for 12 days. And on 11 June 2014 it stopped working, giving message wrong username/password. We wrote to the support twice once to ask why are we cut off, and second email to ask for refund, and on the second day we got a reply that web site and servers were being updated. We wrote to them that although we can login at their web site, we can not login at the VPN servers, but with no reply so far. So, we paid for 1 year, but what we got was 12 days, after which our account was cut off. No refund, nothing whatsoever. We have no idea what is going on, but we would certainly not recommend that VPN to anybody.
Boxpn is useless. I paid for the service, after I connected, I went to http://checkip.dyndns.com and it still show my original ip. Tried contacting them but their resp. is so damn slow and you have to repeat everything you mentioned to them over and over again. So don’t waste your money.
non-existant support crap service worst VPN I have ever used.
avoid like the plague. non-existent support. only automated replies.
constant disconnects & frequent downtimes.
I have started using Boxpn in 2013 and it’s still excellent service. I’m not sure why so many negative comments here, but i’m fully satisfied with their service and support.
I cancelled within the trial period which was confirmed and the initial payment refunded. But I forgot to also cancel in paypal the recurring fee payment… so it got charged again in the 2nd year but BoxPN refuses to refund !!!!
BOXPN STEALS YOUR MONEY!
WHEN YOU CANCEL IN THE TRIAL PERIOD THEY WILL CHARGE YOU AGAIN IN THE 2ND YEAR IN CASE YOU FORGET ALSO TO CANCEL IN PAYPAL RECURRING PAYMENT AND WILL NOT REFUND YOU!!!!!
that’s your fault for not cancelling your Paypal subscription. It wasn’t them charging you, but you sending money for the 2nd time. Your account, your money, your control. Be more careful about it in the future.
Doesn’t sound good that they refused to refund your 2nd payment, but you can always open a PayPal dispute for such reason.
AVOID THIS SCAM COMPANY THEY ARE CRIMINALS! I subscribed to boxpn for a couple of years, and then decided to end my membership. They use paypal for recurring payments. I lost access to my paypal account that was linked to my credit card. However, the subscription kept going with unauthorized charges. Once I asked them to manually end my subscription, they REFUSED to do so!! They told me it is my responsibility to make sure that I do not have my paypal account charged by them, and that 1) they REFUSED to tell me even which paypal account is being charged, and 2) they REFUSED to accept my request to end membership. I will surely take legal action against them. Avoid this company, they will charge your credit card FOREVER even if you ask them IN WRITTEN FORM to cancel your subscription! Even though they had my WRITTEN REQUEST to cancel membership, they kept telling me that “It is your obligation to cancel it from within your PayPal account” even though I made it clear to them that I do not have access to paypal anymore. THEY WILL STEAL YOUR MONEY, AND YOU’LL HAVE NO WAY TO REACH THEM.