Even if you have encrypted your traffic with a VPN, advanced traffic analysis is a growing threat against your privacy. Therefore, we have developed DAITA – a feature available in our VPN app. Through constant packet sizes, random background traffic and data pattern distortion, we are taking the battle against AI-guided traffic analysis.
If they provided port forwarding I would also use them…
Hey they did support it until they were getting difficult legal contacts because some users were abusing it, and getting turned away by different hosting providers.
They shut it down to protect the rest of us who use it without abusing it.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports
I know the port forwarding thing can be a deal-breaker for some people, but it’s not Mullvad’s fault that they needed to remove this to be able to continue providing quality services for the rest of their customer base.
This is sadly one of those “this is why we can’t have nice things” type deals because when enough people abuse it, it becomes a problem. I have no ill will towards Mullvad for taking it away when it became financially and legally foolish to continue doing so.
How are other VPN services able to do port forwarding without having this problem?
This is to be honest a huge barrier for me.
What’s the benefit of port forwarding when using a VPN?
When you torrent you can only connect to peers that have open ports, if your ports are closed. Which means it makes it a lot harder to upload if you rely on private trackers and maintaining a good ratio. One can still download and upload, but for especially older torrents it has a good chance to affect your speeds and ability to download.
This is accurate when using the BT protocol. However if you have uTP (Micro Transport Protocol) enabled, it has “support for NAT traversal using UDP hole punching between two port-restricted peers where a third unrestricted peer acts as a STUN server.”