Previewing routing policy before VPN server selection

Good day,

Some VPN MSPs such as NordVPN have a downloadable OVPN configuration which contains connection details about each particular server. This is useful because, before connecting to a location that is potentially not a good route from my current ISP, I can dismiss them by studying the configuration.

In Bitdefender VPN I can select a country, but the ISP where I end up (and therefore the route) is only determined after connection.

I am particularly displeased with using United States servers while roaming in Europe. The routes often end up in weird configs, in internet exchanges taking long unnecessary routes from southern europe all the way to the UK before finally reaching a USA ISP, when there are much more direct variants that some VPNs take, like Kaspersky, where all peers are ASNs from the US, in ranking order, actually.

Is this configuration list inside the VPN app's memory, and therefore inaccessible, or is it determined from a remote server? Is there any possible way that someone could tell me which United States server for example (which state) I should pick from Italy so that the route does not have weird ASNs from non United States jurisdictions as proxies?

Thanks!

Find more posts tagged with

network

vpn

Comments

Alexandru_BD

Hello,

First of all, the Bitdefender VPN doesn't offer an openvpn configuration, like some other providers do. Also, the routes are determined in the cloud based on criteria such as distance, number of hops, load on the VPN servers, etc. - all with the aim of serving a server that provides the best speed available.
Unfortunately, for now you cannot manually control the route selection, but the VPN developers will consider it as a future product improvement.

Regards,

Alex

Septimiu

Hi all,

Thanks for the friendly responses so far!
I have been doing some experimentation, and from Italy, I realised the potentially best servers for me might be Houston, Phoenix, and maybe Miami. From my research, Germany is a great exit point to be connecting there, while many other countries rely heavily on Sweden's cable infrastructure. (sorry if I'm wrong)

I have a problem connecting from Italy to Romania directly from Fastweb ISP though.

The trace I get is:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.254

  2    10 ms    10 ms    10 ms  10.8.3.30

  3     8 ms     7 ms     7 ms  10.8.5.97

  4    10 ms     8 ms     8 ms  10.8.5.114

  5    10 ms    10 ms    10 ms  10.8.4.229

  6    10 ms     9 ms     9 ms  10.254.9.45

  7    17 ms    17 ms    17 ms  10.254.11.141

  8    18 ms    18 ms    18 ms  62-101-124-94.fastres.net [62.101.124.94]

  9    18 ms    17 ms    17 ms  93-63-100-253.ip27.fastwebnet.it [93.63.100.253]

 10     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 11    48 ms    48 ms    48 ms  be-2-2991.bb1n.lon2.uk.m247.ro [37.120.220.116]

Again, sorry if I'm wrong, but that seems like an exaggerated stretch. And I can't even tell (using Cloudflare or other DNS record tools) if it's a Romanian IX or something entirely different which resolves as .ro

My ISP also does weird things with FWA and wireless meshing in my neighbourhood, and I don't know if the subnets with 10.* and other weird calls to 198.18.0.0/15 are working well with my Bitdefender VPN.

Cheers!