The pre-roll ad on a free stream takes longer to buffer than the show itself. That was the actual problem running through my head in Bangkok recently, a plate of pad krapow going cold next to the laptop while my partner tried to get through a client call on the same overworked hotel wifi. Ask any digital nomad streaming from three time zones away from home and they'll tell you the real travel VPN headache usually isn't unblocking a show, it's the ads and trackers riding along with it that eat the connection before the video even gets a chance.
Quick disclosure while we're at it: this page contains affiliate links, and if you sign up for a service through one of them I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I've paid for and actually used every VPN mentioned here myself, across years of bouncing between Lisbon, Bangkok, and Mexico City — mostly out of an irrational fear of missing an episode of University Challenge. None of that changes what I actually think of any of them, good or bad.
Bangkok's Wifi Couldn't Handle the Ads
That Bangkok trip was where I hit a wall. Long before I'd ever touched PIA's MACE setting, my go-to fix for a laggy connection was routing everything through an old work VPN from a design job back in London — credentials nobody had bothered to revoke when I left. It worked, for about a week, right up until IT noticed the bandwidth spike and sent a very polite, very pointed email asking exactly what I'd been streaming at that volume. That option closed fast, and rightly so.
Most streaming sites that aren't the big paid ones — and even some that are — are crawling with trackers and ad scripts you never notice on fast home broadband. On a hotel connection that's already struggling to breathe, those extra requests are like trying to jog while someone keeps lobbing bricks at your ankles. That's what finally pushed me to look properly at a setting inside PIA I'd been ignoring for months: MACE.
What Does MACE's Ad-Blocking Actually Do?
I'm not a network engineer, just someone who wants her shows to load, but the way I've always explained MACE to friends is with a phonebook. Normally, when your laptop wants to reach a website, it asks a Domain Name System for the address, the way you'd flip through a phonebook to find a number. A regular VPN just looks that address up for you. MACE does something extra: before it hands over any address, it checks the request against a list of known ad and tracker domains and simply refuses to look those up at all.
Because Private Internet Access [Privacy-First] blocks these requests at that phonebook level, the ad never gets far enough to try loading — it doesn't get hidden behind a blank box, it just never happens as far as your browser's concerned. That matters more than people expect once you're somewhere with high latency, where every extra request your laptop makes has to travel further and takes longer to come back. Cut out a hundred small ad requests and you've freed up real room for the one request that actually matters: your video.
None of this is the same as some of the other VPN features I get asked about. It won't get you a different Netflix library if you're not physically in that country — that's a straight-up regional catalogue swap, not an ad problem — and it won't stop a streaming platform from flagging the connection as a VPN if the IP's been shared by five hundred other travellers that week. It doesn't hand you a private IP of your own either. What MACE does is much narrower: it keeps the junk from ever loading, full stop.
The Protocol Setting That Wasted an Evening in Porto
There's a learning curve to PIA, and I found it the hard way in an old building in Porto, where I spent a good stretch of one evening convinced the local ISP was throttling us, before realising I'd left the protocol switched to OpenVPN instead of WireGuard in the settings. PIA is endlessly customisable, which is exactly what makes it useful once you know your way around, and exactly what makes it easy to trip over if you like to tinker without reading the manual first. Once I'd flipped that one toggle, the difference was immediate. If buffering keeps creeping back in no matter what you try, my piece on How to Fix Buffering on Firestick While Using a Travel VPN walks through the settings I check first these days.
Streaming Without Stealing His Bandwidth
That same building in Porto had walls thick enough to survive anything short of a direct hit, which also meant they ate most of the wifi signal before it reached our room. My partner ran video calls back to back that week, and there's a specific sigh he does when a call finally stops stuttering — the one that means the spinning wheel has given up and gone home. Switching on PIA with MACE enabled made an audible difference; the background noise of the connection just dropped away, and browsing generally felt lighter, not only the streaming — same settings, whether the show was running on a laptop or thrown up onto the room's smart TV.
Couples travelling together tend to end up fighting over whoever's got the stronger signal at any given moment, which is its own small tax on a relationship. Surfshark [Unlimited Devices] solves a different piece of that problem since it doesn't cap how many devices you can connect at once, which matters when you're both trying to do something bandwidth-heavy from the same router. For the ad-clutter specifically, though, PIA's MACE is still what I reach for — I wrote more on the device side of things in Why Surfshark is the Best VPN for Travel with Multiple Devices if that's more your problem than mine was.
A University Challenge Final Worth the Panic
By the time we moved on to Mexico City, I'd become a full MACE convert. We were staying somewhere with a captive portal, one of those login screens that makes you 'agree to terms' every few hours, and those portals often hate VPNs because they try to inject their own tracking into the session. A standard ad-blocker can end up fighting that. Because MACE operates at the DNS level rather than patching things after the page has already loaded, it mostly just sidesteps the argument entirely.
The stakes felt disproportionately high the week of the University Challenge final. I'd kept up with the whole series without missing an episode, and I was not about to let some ad-injection script decide whether I found out if Imperial or UCL took the trophy. I remember the loading bar hitting 99% and sitting there a beat too long, that specific stomach-drop when you think the stream's about to die on you. Then it snapped forward. Clear picture, no buffering, no dreaded 'not available in your region' message.
That regional-availability message is actually a different animal to anything MACE deals with, which I only understood properly after a reader named Saoirse emailed me from Tokyo, a few months into a teaching contract that had quietly locked her out of ITVX entirely. That's a straight geo-block — the platform checking where you physically are and refusing outright — not ad-clutter, and no amount of ad-blocking fixes it. She'd already tried most of the obvious fixes and had a bookmarked list of everything before she even wrote to me, so sorting out a working server took us all of two messages back and forth.
Why Does PIA Still Earn a Spot in the Bag?
I'll still reach for NordVPN [Best Value] when I need one of its labelled streaming servers in a hurry, or ExpressVPN [Editor's Pick] when I just need something that works on my phone without thinking about it. But PIA stays in the bag for the long haul. It covers a wide spread of countries, so there's almost always a fast option nearby, and switching to a different server in the same country is usually enough to fix a stall — no new subscription required, no drama.
Back at the flat we're renting in Graça, our base between the trips out to Bangkok and Mexico City, the travel router lives permanently plugged in next to two laptops on the big table on the balcony that catches the afternoon sun most days. One kitchen drawer has quietly become a dumping ground for spare SIM cards and ethernet leads nobody can ever find when they need them, and there's a row of sticky notes near the desk, each one tracking which server last actually worked for iPlayer — relying on memory alone stopped working somewhere around country number two.
My friend Sorcha, who has an almost suspicious talent for knowing which café in the neighbourhood has the fastest wifi, was the one who first told me to just leave MACE switched on permanently instead of only reaching for it when things got bad. So I did. By around the tenth week of running it as the default rather than the exception, I'd mostly stopped thinking about it — until a short stay near Príncipe Real made it obvious. I'd assumed the flat's wifi would be as patchy as everything else about the trip, but the BBC Two ident rendered at full resolution the moment the app opened: no half-second of pixelation, no spinning wheel, nothing to second-guess. It looked like ordinary telly, which after months of squinting at buffering wheels felt like more of an event than it probably should have.
If you're tired of fighting hotel wifi just to watch a bit of home telly, the MACE approach is worth the ten minutes it takes to switch on. It's not really about dodging adverts so much as making sure your connection has room to do the one thing you actually want it to do. For anyone specifically wrestling with proxy errors on other platforms rather than ad-clutter, my notes on Best Ways to Watch Hulu Outside US Without Constant Buffering cover a related but different set of fixes.
Flights for the next move are already open in another tab, and the wifi's VPN-friendliness gets checked before almost anything else about a new place — shower pressure included. If you want to stop babysitting a buffering wheel and just watch your show, you can grab Private Internet Access here. Give yourself a few minutes to get the settings right the first time, and both your bandwidth and whoever you're travelling with will thank you for it.