If your VPN has given you an IP address exactly where you requested, then it seems to be working as it should. Close and restart your client, connect to several servers and verify their location with the (opens in new tab) site. If the IP address is from another country, but not the one you selected, your VPN may be at fault.

If the report shows your home country and ISP, the VPN connection may have dropped or stopped working. Note that geolocation isn't a precise science, so don't worry if there are several suggested cities – the country is what matters. The site runs your IP address through several web services and displays the city and country where it thinks you're located. To check this for yourself, point your browser at IP Location (opens in new tab) immediately after you've had any location problems. In that case it might look like you're using a VPN server far away, but any website will just see your regular IP. They might show you as connected, even if the VPN drops. The second problem is that some poorly programmed VPN clients don't properly monitor your connection state. As a result, although we thought we were connected to the UK, BBC iPlayer wouldn't play as we appeared to be from another country. For example, one VPN we tested gave us German and US IPs when we connected to its two UK servers. Sometimes a VPN client will say it has allocated an IP address from one country, but actually use somewhere else entirely. There are two issues to think about here.

The first step in diagnosing VPN location issues is to confirm what your client software is telling you. (Image credit: ) Verify your VPN location

Itools 4 virtual location failed