Among the many noble reasons people use VPN services, there are also some less serious ones that are no less important. One such use is in the neverending battle against the geo-blocking measures of Netflix. Hence our question for today – is the CyberGhost Netflix combination worth a damn? Read on to find out.
The Netflix woes of non-Americans
As you may know if you have Netflix – and as you will sadly find out if you’re about to buy a subscription – the streaming giant could work on its openness. Due to geographically-defined copyright agreements, the Netflix library changes depending on the user’s location. It is entirely possible that the show you are interested in is located in another castle!
It so happens that the land of the plenty when it comes to great Netflix content is the United States. That’s the platform with the most goodies, and most people would ideally have access to that particular library.
How a VPN can help
We can hear the deafening sound of your Eurasian eyes rolling, but there’s good news! The best minds of the world have come up with a way to fool online services into believing that we call football “soccer” and vice versa. The name of this awesome tool? Virtual Private Networking (VPN).
To put it simply, Virtual Private Networks let you send all of your online traffic through a server in the country of your choice, making the host server believe that you’re based in that country. Your IP address becomes the VPN server-given IP address.
CyberGhost Netflix – is it a thing?
Unfortunately for impatient consumers, not every VPN is equal when it comes to unblocking Netflix or providing a good streaming experience. CyberGhost is generally one of the top tools on the market – surely, it’s good for Netflix as well?
We ran a bunch of tests for our CyberGhost Netflix article, and the answer is: “mostly – yes, but it depends.” This VPN is excellent if you’re in Europe and your interest is Netflix US in particular. The speeds are good, and the good people at Netflix have no idea what hit them – no errors whatsoever.
But there’s more to say on the CyberGhost Netflix topic.
Field testing: is CyberGhost good for Netflix?
The first thing we did was connect to the Netflix-optimized CyberGhost server in the United States. We then went to Netflix and tried streaming a show – the Outlaw King, to be precise.
- USA
Chris Pine’s greasy beard was there in full royal glory, every UltraHD pixel of it. There was no stuttering either, and the loading times were great – we could scroll around the episode as we would on VLC. Needless to say, we also didn’t encounter the infamous “you seem to be using a proxy or unblocker” error.
Then, we went to Netflix’ very own speed testing service – fast.com – and saw precisely why our experience on Netflix was as good as it was. Here’s the download speed:
For reference, Netflix claims 5 Mbps download is enough to stream HD video, and 25 Mbps is enough to stream UltraHD content. As you can see, our CyberGhost Netflix download speed is more than enough for UHD.
UK
Then, we tried Netflix using the UK Netflix-optimized server. Again, there were no issues at all, but the speed was not nearly as impressive:
This was surprising – we are located a lot closer to the UK than we are to America. While we had no problem streaming either HD or UHD content, those with slower connections may encounter some serious issues.
Netherlands
Amsterdam is where we found our best results. Netflix was unblocked, and the speeds were intense:
Australia
CyberGhost understandably made us a lot slower Down under, but we could still stream relatively unimpeded:
CyberGhost’s speed in Australia was almost (but not quite) enough to stream 4k video. The only other caveat is that the ping was quite high, making Netflix less responsive.
Japan and Canada
We tried half-a-dozen CyberGhost Tokyo servers and quite a few Canadian servers. Here’s what we have to show for it:
So is the CyberGhost Netflix bond real?
Yes, but there are disclaimers to make. First of all, here is our base download speed at the time of testing:
That makes our Netflix US speed a third of our regular speed. That’s better for orientation than the Mbps number – will a third of your base download speed be enough to stream Netflix US in HD or UltraHD?
Secondly, if you’re interested in unlocking less popular Netflix libraries – there may be a problem. CyberGhost is good for Netflix, but only the mainstream locations, unlike some other VPN services (ExpressVPN, NordVPN, etc.).
Other CyberGhost streaming capabilities
CyberGhost has lots of streaming-optimized servers in different countries, so you should be able to access a lot more than just Netflix. For example, there are CyberGhost servers optimized for:
- Hulu
- BBC iPlayer
- Amazon Prime
- Sky
- Youtube
- Youtube Red
- Crunchyroll
- ZDF
And that’s not even the end of it. We had some success streaming on non-optimized servers as well. So if you’re interested in accessing some obscure, avant-garde streaming platform from Bhutan – who knows, you may well be able to access it using CyberGhost.
Other good choices for Netflix fans include ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and Astrill VPN. Or check our Best VPN for Netflix list!
