Using a VPN with your iPhone
Here is our step by step guide to getting your VPN setup on your iPhone. The steps for your iPad / iPod touch are similar and you should probably be able to figure that out yourself. This is a post that we had planned to put on VPN.ie, but for some reason this blog gets more readers, so it’s probably more useful here.
Step 1 : get your iPhone
Our iPhone looks like this, the settings screen is the last icon on the 2nd row.
Step 2 : Enter Settings
This is the top of the settings screen. Here you can control lots parts of your phone, but we are only interested in the VPN setting. So click that one that says VPN – not connected.
Step 3 : Select a configuration or create a new one
Many VPN providers can provide you with a file that you can open on your phone that will load in the details of your VPN server, your username & password. It’s possible to have more than one configuration. We are using Overplay here and we have settings for Ireland, the UK and the US. This allows us to switch easily between different VPN gateways. To add a new VPN connection on your iPhone click Add VPN configuration…
Step 4 :Entering your VPN details
We won’t show you a blank setting page, rather you can see our settings for a real VPN connection. Here the description can be set to anything you wish, it’s the label that you see in step 3 of this guide. Then you have the the server address, this can be an IP address or a sever name like we have in our example. The account will be your username that’s supplied by your VPN provider. We leave the RSA SecurID off. The password is like any password field, it will hide your password a few seconds after you type it. We generally leave the other settings like encryption level and Send all traffic to their defaults just for simplicity.
Once you have the config done you can go back to the last screen, and toggle the VPN on / off button.
And there you have it, now your iPhone is connected to your VPN and you can surf the web as if you are in a different country. You don’t need any type of special iPhone app to connect to the VPN, you can just enter in the settings outlined above. We use our VPN a lot when using public WiFi, as you never can trust if someone’s router is entirely safe or not.
Pick a good VPN
If you are looking for a VPN we can recommend our VPN comparison page which breaks down the main features of each of the VPN providers we’ve tested and trust.
Using a VPN with your iPhone,