The service is a relatively new entrant in the free VPN market, introduced by Urban Cyber Security Inc. in 2018. On the website, the VPN claims to offer good speed, unlimited bandwidth, and completely anonymous connections. However, its use of P2P raises questions, which isn’t common practice among VPNs. So, are these claims valid? We tested it thoroughly to find out the answer to this question. So, here is our unbiased review of Urban VPN to let you know more about it.
Urban VPN key specifications
| Price | Free |
| Simultaneous connections | Unlimited |
| Protocols | OpenVPN |
| Browser Extensions | Yes |
| Customer support | Email and ticketing system |
| No-logs policy | Questionable |
| Jurisdiction | United States |
| Network | 4572+ servers in 84 locations |
| Compatibility | Windows, Android, iOS |
Urban VPN pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Boasts a completely free plan | Collect and sell user data |
| User-friendly interface | No manual server location selection |
| Decent speed | No kill switch |
| Multi-languages support | Not available on all platforms |
| A quick and effortless setup process | Lacks essential security and privacy features |
| No customer support |
Urban VPN speed test
Speed is an essential factor to consider when choosing a VPN. Initially, people mainly focused on a VPN’s capability to protect their connections and keep them anonymous. However, speed is equally important these days because of tasks like streaming, gaming, or downloading torrents. So, while working on this in-depth review, we put Urban VPN to the test, and here’s what we observed.
Speed without a VPN
First, we recorded our base internet speed before connecting to the VPN. It would be our benchmark to see how Urban VPN affects the speed.
Note: A VPN encrypts your traffic and routes it through intermediary servers. This adds extra steps between your device and the internet, which is bound to slow down your internet connection.
| Download speed (Mbps) | Upload speed (Mbps) | Latency (ms) |
| 237.83 | 350.37 | 5.2 |
Speed on a local server
Below is the speed test results when we connected to a local Urban VPN server.
| Download speed (Mbps) | Upload speed (Mbps) | Latency (ms) |
| 228.69 | 361.72 | 5.58 |
As you can see, the drop in download speed is minimal when using a local server. That is because your data packets travel a short distance from your device to the server.
Strangely, the upload speed increased slightly. Sometimes, internet service providers (ISPs) throttle internet speed to balance bandwidth distribution on the network. A VPN helps to overcome the issue, which may be what happened here.
However, the latency (delay) also increased a bit after connecting to the VPN server. Higher latency means a poor connection.
While these results aren’t bad for a free VPN, Urban VPN’s speed unstable and varies a lot, as we’ll discuss later.
Speed on a distant server
Below is the speed test results when we connected to a distant Urban VPN server.