So it’s not like I’m always out here talking about Virtual Private Networks; I’m not a YouTube ad read. But the few times I bring them up in polite company, the conversation screeches to a halt as I slowly realize that nobody knows what I’m talking about. Thankfully, that’s changing as VPNs become more of a known quantity and the industry consolidates into the hands of a few big companies (weird, that sounds familiar). In the meantime, the $190 ExpressVPN Aircove router is intended to be there, waiting, as more folks look for convenient ways to keep their web traffic obscured.
See, that’s what a VPN does—when you connect to it, good VPN software encrypts and diverts your web traffic to its own servers, then sends it off to where you were trying to go, except now with a new origin IP address that’s not your home network. Some even support multi-hop connections, so your traffic bounces around two or more times, making it more difficult to follow. With a VPN, you can keep your browsing habits hidden from prying eyes, including those of your ISP (internet service provider). You can also use a VPN to hide your IP from hackers or unlock region-specific streaming shows (or more privately sail the high seas, so to speak).
It probably shouldn't be your only router, but it's a great way to make a smart home more private.
It probably shouldn't be your only router, but it's a great way to make a smart home more private.
The Aircove takes this concept and puts it in a router, automatically encrypting traffic for your entire home network if you like. It’s sort of a first-of-its-kind thing. That’s not to say there haven’t been routers with VPN functionality built into them before—there have—but the Aircove is more of a fully-fledged router in its own right rather than a VPN device with a router tacked on. As such, it uses comparatively powerful hardware and more modern wireless protocols than prior attempts. It also benefits from vertical integration, a term we normally associate with big-name companies like Apple, which controls both the hardware and software stacks of its products. The Aircove is so wrapped up in the VPN experience that, when you first set it up, entering an ExpressVPN activation code (or signing up for a new account) is the first thing it wants you to do. So before you even set your router’s SSID and password or handle any other configuration, you have to get the VPN going (which is a separate subscription, by the way, and admittedly kind of pricey as these things go).
3-in-1 fast charging This all in one charging station can charge your phone, Galaxy Watch, and earbuds at once.
It’s a cute way for Express to tell you its router is serious about privacy, and a clever way to make sure you know for sure what the Aircove is all about.
ExpressVPN is one of the best VPN services you can get today. Its apparent privacy practices are strong; I say ‘apparent’ because we can’t really know how secure ExpressVPN’s servers are without direct access and testing by many different companies and expert privacy advocates. The company itself has commissioned 16 independent audits of its privacy and security practices, including a recent one by independent auditor Cure53 of the router itself, but we have to take them with a grain of salt. Performance-wise, ExpressVPN is up there with NordVPN, if a touch slower when using both providers’ bespoke VPN protocols. I’ve used both, and I tend to only see around a 10% slower download speed compared to no VPN with either.
ExpressVPN is generally accepted to be a top-tier, no-logging service—that is, the company keeps no persistent logs of user data apart from what it uses for technical maintenance, which the company says can’t be traced to any one user (this appears to be confirmed by the December 2022 audit of ExpressVPN’s privacy claims by auditing firm KPMG in a publicly-accessible report), and the Aircove is the first dedicated hardware from such a company. As I said above, there have been VPN routers before, but fully designed and produced by a VPN company, with control over the router hardware design and software, as well as the VPN service? That’s new.
There are good reasons to use a VPN router versus running the service via software on each device. Running a VPN on a laptop or smartphone uses local CPU resources, so having everything done at the network-level offloads that, meaning you’ll have more power at your disposal. But there are trade-offs. It’s a little less convenient without a taskbar app at your disposal, you don’t get as many options per device, and network-level VPNs are slower, for reasons we’ll get into below.
Network-level VPN comes with a much bigger penalty to your throughput than you’d get running the software directly on your computer. That’s because it takes fast, dedicated hardware to quickly encrypt your data before it leaves your home network, which your computer has—routers just don’t have the horsepower, even one with a Qualcomm quad-core CPU like the one found in the Aircove (and plenty of other routers). Considering that, ExpressVPN’s router does a pretty good job.
How good? For me, it managed about a fifth (between 82Mbps and 120Mbps) of my 500Mbps downstream connection, with almost no penalty to upload throughput. That’s still fast enough for decent download speeds and more than enough to stream—in what passes for 4K in these parts—the latest episode of Picard and the Gang. Switching to a wired gigabit connection goosed it a little, pushing around 140Mbps on most speedtests (using Ookla Speedtest). Playing with the VPN protocols available to me, I was able to get over 160Mbps when I switched to the faster but less compatible IKEv2 protocol. If you don’t know what I mean by protocol, it’s basically the standardized software that determines how traffic is encrypted and transmitted, and which security methods it uses to communicate with servers.
Still, I don’t think you should use the VPN for your high-bandwidth applications. Probably the best use for it is obscuring traffic for devices that traditionally can’t use VPN software—smart home devices like Wi-Fi light switches, plugs, appliances, and smart TVs often send traffic to and from manufacturers’ servers, sometimes with no encryption. Connecting these exclusively to the Aircove so their data leaves your network already-encrypted is an appealing idea. And don’t worry—since the Aircove only counts as one device toward the five-device total that comes with the company’s standard VPN plan, you can still use ExpressVPN’s dedicated software on your main computer even after connecting so many devices to the Aircove.
There are a couple of ways of setting up the Aircove so that it can protect your otherwise un-encryptable devices while letting a faster device service the rest of your home network. The best way is probably to attach the Aircove to another router and use it as a separate access point for the devices you want it to cover. Then, use ExpressVPN’s software for your computers, tablets, and phones, connected to your primary router. Devices protected via software will also gain features like a tracker and malicious site blocking, though during a briefing with the company’s Aircove product manager, David Gilbert, I was told the company is working on adding these features to the router soon.
There are basically three kinds of router designs: air freshener chic lumps (or obelisks) that meekly take up as little space as possible, spiky spaceships dripping with RGB lights and promises of perfect headshots, and the all-business black boxes that know what they are and know that you don’t care what they look like. The Aircove falls in the latter category, and it looks fine. On the back, it has four mildly adjustable antennas, four ethernet ports and a little barrel-shaped plug for its 12-volt power brick. On the side, you’ll find a WPS button and hidden USB-A port. As for its performance and configuration options, they’re about as thrilling as a tepid, shallow pool on a hot, cloudless summer day in Texas.
For most ordinary peoples’ needs, the Aircove is fine—it’s a dual band, so you’ll get separate bands for 2.4GHz and 5GHz connections, though pricier tri-band routers are more versatile, as they give you an additional, often higher-throughput 5GHz (or sometimes 6GHz, as in the case of Wi-Fi 6E) band for your most speed-critical uses, such as large downloads or cloud back-ups. It’s also a Wi-Fi 6 router, meaning it uses a protocol that brings key enhancements to Wi-Fi that offers greater security and stability, the latter owing to improved wireless interference handling. Wi-FI 6 is the standard on which Wi-Fi 6E is built (the only difference being that Wi-Fi 6E adds the 6GHz band, which was only opened for unlicensed use in April 2020 and offers faster speed, thanks to having nearly double the 160MHz-wide channels offered by the 5GHz spectrum).
Wi-Fi has been moving fast in the last few years, and Wi-Fi 6 is still a relatively new standard—Wi-Fi 6 certification only arrived in 2019—and though there were routers supporting it very soon after, like the Asus RT-AX88U, some of the most popular smartphones and computers on the market today (I’m looking at you, Apple) still haven’t adopted it. That’s to say nothing of the forthcoming Wi-Fi 7 protocol, which promises massive speed increases and other performance upgrades, but which won’t be certified until at least 2024. Given the slow uptake of even Wi-Fi 6E, there’s not much reason to hold out for a Wi-Fi 7 router now, unless you just really like having wireless networking bragging rights.
In short, for most peop Source: Gizmodo