StreamVia VPN review

StreamVia is a vendor of VPN services that provides its users with a residential IP from the territory of the United Kingdom. The residential VPN model is harder to detect by third-parties since it looks like a standard home UK broadband connection, and therefore more effective in terms of online privacy and unblocking of geo-restricted content.

Price

This provider’s services are available under several options, of which the cheapest is the UK Residential VPN - BT Shared IP plan, which costs £24.99 ($33.85) a month. It unblocks all UK streaming sites and bypasses all UK IP location blocks, but supports concurrent connections on up to 2 devices only, uses only the OpenVPN transfer protocol, gives you a static IP address, and imposes a 2000GB fair usage limit.

If you want a non-residential IP address in more locations, as well as access to SmartStream DNS, more transfer protocols, and support for up to 5 simultaneous connections, you’ll pay an additional £6.99 ($9.47) per month on top of your basic account subscription.

The next account subscription is called UK Residential VPN - BT Dedicated IP (£54.99 or $74.44 per month) and includes dedicated IP addresses and support for up to 5 concurrent connections.

You can also get your hands on a UK 4G/LTE mobile IP address (allows you to appear as a 4G/LTE mobile user and is highly resistant to blocking), dedicated 4G/LTE router, dedicated mobile SIM card, dynamic IP addresses, control over the 4G router, and 100GB of data. However, the price of the mobile account is exorbitant, costing £149.99 or $203.34 per month.

At checkout, you can add to your purchase a router that is already preconfigured with your Residential VPN account. This way you’ll be able to use as many devices as you like under one VPN connection. The router costs £150.00 ($203.37).

There is no free trial, but you can make use of the unusually short, 3-day money-back guarantee. But bear in mind it will not be granted if you’ve used more than 1GB of total data for Shared, 100MB for Dedicated, or 10GB for Traditional (non-residential) VPN accounts. We tested this claim and were issued a refund immediately, no questions asked.

You can only pay using a credit/debit card or PayPal. No other payment methods are accepted.

Alternatives

Although clearly capable, StreamVia might not appeal to the general VPN public due to several qualities. For instance, it doesn’t have thousands of servers all over the world like NordVPN, low prices like Surfshark, or an exceptionally generous money-back guarantee like CyberGhost (45 days).

If you're going to splash out on a VPN, meanwhile, look no further than ExpressVPN.

Streaming

Many users choose to purchase a VPN service just so they can access video content they otherwise wouldn’t be able to in their region. This is especially true for streaming content on popular channels like Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, or BBC iPlayer.

Thanks to its capabilities to bypass the many location detection methods imposed by such services, StreamVia can provide you with access to all of them. If this part of the service isn’t working for you for any reason, there are guides available on the website to assist you.

About the company

The company behind this VPN service, StreamVia Limited, is registered in London. It offers access to VPN servers in 18 countries including Australia, Poland, Japan, Singapore, Iceland, and others.

Privacy and encryption

The welcoming email very strongly asserts that torrenting is not tolerated and that “external reports of abuse will result in your account being terminated without refund”.

In the vendor’s Acceptable Usage Policy, it says that it forbids “the use of file sharing (P2P) programs or programs with the aim to facilitate the means to download pirated/illegal content such as, but not exclusively limited to, BitTorrent, uTorrent, Azureus, Vuze, Popcorn Time, Usenet, etc on ALL StreamVia servers. The use of file sharing or Usenet clients is permitted on the Netherlands/NL servers, for legal content, the downloading of copyrighted content is forbidden.”

Depending on the chosen subscription option, StreamVia uses OpenVPN, L2TP, PPTP, and Stealth VPN.

StreamVia’s Privacy Policy states the company logs your username, a timestamp when you connect to and disconnect from the service, the amount of data transmitted during your session, the IP address used by you to connect to the VPN, the IP address of the individual VPN server used by you, and which ports of the individual VPN server you used.

It states that it doesn’t store “details of, or monitor, the resources (including websites) you connect to or any of the data sent or received” over its network when using its VPN service. That said, until we have outside confirmation of these claims, we have no choice but to take the provider’s word for it.

Support

StreamVia can be enabled on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Linux devices, as well as routers, with the help of customized and pre-configured OpenVPN apps and/or separate configuration files.

For such an expensive VPN service, StreamVia has a slightly limited amount of helpful content available on the website, specifically in its help section. However, the little content there is may just be enough to address your concerns. If not, then we suggest contacting customer support directly via email or support ticket (no live chat, sorry!).

We’re yet to receive a response to our email, but considering how quickly we were issued a refund, we believe any concrete problem you might have will be resolved just as fast.

Speed and experience

Despite not having native clients and relying on third-party software and/or configuration files, StreamVia isn’t terribly difficult to navigate. This is mostly thanks to the fact the provider offers detailed instructions and configurations you can easily access. It is, however, more complicated and less practical than simply having native apps for all major platforms.

We tested a few UK server options on a 72.30Mbps testing connection. The speeds for “option 1” ranged from 14Mbps to a very good 27.91Mbps, while “option 2” delivered around 5.70Mbps.

Verdict

StreamVia gives its users access to residential UK IP addresses, which make the fact you're going through a VPN. This allows you to access more geo-restricted content and have more privacy than you would with a non-residential VPN.

However, this comes at a price that is substantially higher than even the most elite providers, all of which boast beautiful native apps and thousands of servers.