You face a stark choice: lose forty minutes to a laggy video call, or lose the whole episode halfway through streaming. That's the actual trade-off most digital nomad VPN reviews skip over, and it's the one Private Internet Access forces on you more often than the glossier apps built for streaming and not much else.
Quick disclosure before anything else, since this is about to get opinionated: this site runs on affiliate links, and if you sign up for a VPN through one of mine — including Private Internet Access — I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Every service mentioned here is one I've actually paid for and dragged through hotel wifi on three continents, not something I read off a spec sheet.
Latency Is the Villain, Not Speed
Most reviews talk about VPN "speed" as if it's the only number worth knowing, but latency — the delay between you hitting mute and the app actually shutting you up — is the one that decides whether a client in Sydney thinks you're professional or just rude. Elsewhere I've broken down VPN overhead in terms of buffering on a Fire Stick, but for an actual live call the more useful frame is round-trip delay, not how much data the pipe can carry; a call falls apart on lag long before it ever runs short of bandwidth. After four years of working from wherever the wifi happened to be fastest that week, that's the number I actually watch now.
The mechanic behind it is simple once you see it: connect to a server that's geographically far from both you and the streaming platform's own servers, and you're adding real, measurable round-trip time — the nearest workable UK server will almost always give you smoother playback than one that just happens to have a flashier name. That's why I spent an evening in the flat in Lisbon's Graça neighbourhood messing with WireGuard settings on Private Internet Access, hunting for the one server that kept my partner's calls clean without wrecking my own connection, while the ethernet adapter feeding the router sat just loose enough in its socket that the whole thing blinked out for a second most hours — meaning every setting I dialed in got tested twice, once on purpose and once by accident. The honest answer to whether ExpressVPN is good for Microsoft Teams calls while traveling abroad is that latency, not marketing, is what actually decides it.
PIA's Control Versus ExpressVPN's Polish
Private Internet Access hands you dials most VPNs hide entirely. You can toggle MTU settings, switch between OpenVPN and WireGuard, force specific ports — I once burned the better part of an hour chasing a phantom connection drop through exactly those settings before realizing I'd simply never turned the wifi back on after a restart. A friend of mine, Bram Hollander, who I know from the nomad circuit through Bangkok and Chiang Mai, thinks this is the entire point of PIA — he insists on split-tunnelling every setup he touches, even the ones that obviously don't need it, and PIA is one of the few apps patient enough to let him.
Set that next to ExpressVPN, which hides almost all of that behind one large connect button, and you get the actual trade-off this whole review comes down to: control versus simplicity. If you're the kind of nomad hauling multiple laptops and a streaming stick between Airbnbs, the setup worth reading is best VPN for travelers with multiple laptops and streaming sticks — PIA rewards people who like tinkering, and it mildly punishes everyone else with a busier, less forgiving app.
Does It Actually Unblock iPlayer When You Need It To?
Before I trusted any VPN for this, I tried the workaround everyone eventually suggests: asking my sister back in Stockport to stay logged into her iPlayer account and just screen-share the stream to me over a video call. It technically worked, in the sense that a picture eventually showed up — compressed, half a beat behind her audio, and unusable the moment either connection wobbled, which in a Bangkok guesthouse (the kind where the wifi router and the shower seem to share a wall) was more or less constant. Private Internet Access does noticeably better than that, though it isn't flawless; the BBC has flagged PIA's data centre IPs mid-series before, and I've had to swap servers three or four times before one slipped through.
The flip side happened in a hotel room in Porto. I opened the iPlayer programme guide on the room's smart TV half-expecting the usual spinning wheel, and instead the whole grid just loaded — no error screen, no "this content isn't available where you are" message, nothing. I sat there for a second, genuinely pleased about something that shouldn't have felt like an achievement.
That said, I still keep CyberGhost VPN running as a backup, mostly for its 45-day money-back window and the streaming-labelled servers that tend to survive the BBC's blocking sweeps a bit longer than PIA's general-purpose ones do. It's the same logic behind why CyberGhost is the best VPN for streaming overseas on Firestick — a service built specifically for streaming will usually out-hustle a privacy-first one when the only goal that night is watching something without a fight.
Multi-Hop Routing Costs You Speed
PIA also offers multi-hop routing, which sends your traffic through two servers instead of one — the digital equivalent of routing a delivery through a second restaurant before it reaches you: more private, technically, but nothing arrives hot. That's obfuscation doing its actual job, the same idea NordVPN builds entire specialty servers around, and it's genuinely useful if you're on a network that's actively hostile. For a video call from an ordinary hotel room, though, it's overkill; a single-hop WireGuard connection gets you there faster, and nobody but you will ever notice the difference.
Comparing Devices, Pricing, and Reconnects
None of that changes how PIA handles the handoff between networks, and here it loses a little ground — switching from hotel wifi to a phone hotspot is smoother on ExpressVPN, even though ExpressVPN caps you at eight simultaneous devices. If you're traveling as a couple or a family running phones, laptops, and a streaming stick off one account, that cap matters more than people admit; Surfshark's unlimited-device allowance solves it outright, though its server network is smaller and its streaming reliability dips just enough that you'll occasionally need to swap servers yourself. PIA doesn't restrict devices nearly as tightly, and its multi-year pricing is about as low as this category gets, which matters if you're trying to keep costs down over a long stretch of travel. A friend from the Lisbon nomad scene, Reuben Quartey, won't touch any subscription without a plain monthly option — he asked about PIA over coffee once and lost interest the second the multi-year commitment came up, which is fair, honestly, if you're not sure you'll still be doing this exact circuit in a year.
Streaming Verdict Versus Remote-Work Verdict
A few things come up constantly when other nomads ask me about this setup. Sitting in a co-working space in Condesa one afternoon, watching Amazon Prime Video's proxy-detection reject a perfectly clean connection twice before letting me through, it struck me how much of this category comes down to geo-blocking — a platform checks your IP's country and decides what you're allowed to see, full stop. PIA doesn't sell a dedicated IP the way some competitors do, so you share a server address with whoever else picked it that day, which is part of why server-switching becomes a habit rather than an occasional annoyance. It also skips the region-spoofing tricks some apps use to convince a service like Disney+ that you're somewhere you're not; PIA plays it straighter. Its DNS-level filtering, which PIA brands MACE, blocks ads and trackers before they load (most VPNs already handle the baseline encryption on open cafe wifi, MACE just does a bit more on top of that). App coverage across phone, laptop, and smart TV is solid without being the best-looking of the bunch, and I've run this exact setup through a travel router for weeks at a time without complaint, which matters more once you're actually living out of a suitcase than any spec sheet does.
So here's the actual split, not the hedge-your-bets version. If your day involves calls that can't afford to glitch — a client meeting, a standup, anything where a dropped frame reads as unprofessional — Private Internet Access earns its keep, and the tinkering is worth it once you've found your server. If your priority is closing the laptop and watching something without thinking about a single setting, why ExpressVPN is the best VPN for BBC iPlayer makes the better case for you instead — it costs more, but it unblocks more consistently and reconnects faster, which is worth paying for if streaming is the whole reason you're doing any of this.
If low latency for actual work is the priority — not background Netflix, but calls that genuinely cannot glitch — my PIA subscription is the one I keep renewing, multi-year plan and all, because the performance on UK and US servers is hard to beat once it's set up properly. Just go in expecting a bit of troubleshooting along the way, and maybe keep a second option ready for the nights you only want University Challenge to load on the first try.