At A&A we are looking in to how we can best help customers exercise their human rights for privacy and rights to net neutrality and to access to legal content.The IP Act puts in place horrendous snooping powers, and the DE Bill as proposed puts in place a new national censor with the job of blocking porn sites - legal porn sites. We can all imagine how much further such proposals could go.
At present there is no ban on operating a VPN - it would be hard to ban without also banning https used by many web sites and businesses and banks and the VPNs used by industry and even parliament.
There are VPN providers now (sensibly) targeting the UK market - they provide an VPN endpoint which you connect to from your computer or using a router that can do VPN for your whole house. They make a point of having equipment and legal entities in countries that do not require logging and snooping, and make a point of not recording anything or accepting orders from governments like the UK.
So, the next question is how we evaluate VPN providers and even make some recommendations. We may even set up a VPN operation ourselves (well, not ourselves, a foreign company with foreign servers, so no subject to UK jurisdiction).
These are this obvious aspects I can think of, but keen on other comments.
Speed
One simple aspect of the service and the devices you choose to operate the VPN at your premises is whether the service can keep up with the speed of your Internet connection, such as an 80Mb/s VDSL service.
Price
Obvious one, but you want a reasonable price. Free is great but there has to be a catch some how, so you expect to pay a few dollars a month at least for any reasonable service.
Anonymity
Are they really not logging anything, do they have a clear history of refusing information requests?
Trust
Can we really trust them? Very hard to be sure but reputation and how long they have been in business are key factors.
Geotagging
Can they have your traffic look like UK traffic (if that is what you want)? This may be tricky and without it things like netflix may not even work. If someone sets up a service specially for UK use they may be able to convince netflix and others that it is UK IP addresses even if plugged in via another country.
Technical
MTU issues, latency, transparency of IP protocols and ports and so on, IPv6. All things that matter from a technical point of view. Ironically, maybe even fixed IP - if blocking/censorship is your main concern.
