Fortunately, we were able to devise a solution to this problem: once we had the final URL of the content, often there would be many redirects before we got to the final URL, we would obtain a handle to the TCP socket (not the TLS-wrapped socket) and read data from this socket directly. This would drive the Whiteboxes’ CPU to 100%, meaning that we wouldn’t be measuring the performance of the broadband connection or the online storage service, we’d be measuring our CPU performance (which is clearly not what we want). On the fastest connections, this would mean that we’d need to decrypt content at hundreds of megabits per second. This presented a challenge for even our latest generation Whitebox, which employs a dual core 880Mhz CPU. In all cases, the online storage services use TLS to encrypt the data in transit. This meant that we’d connect to the storage providers over IPv6 when both the user’s broadband connection and online storage provider supported it. We enabled the operating system ( OpenWrt) on our Whiteboxes to choose to use either IPv4 or IPv6 for the transfer - we didn’t force the traffic to use one or the other. The IP address of the server that delivered the content was recorded as well, which allowed us to trace the location from where the content was delivered. A single TCP connection was used for the download measurement (mimicking the behaviour of the real clients we tested here). The download duration was limited to 10 seconds. We then instructed approximately 180 SamKnows Whiteboxes, deployed on the fastest speed tiers of major UK broadband ISPs, to download these files and measure the transfer speed.
We uploaded a 500MB test file to publicly-accessible folders on Dropbox, Google Drive, and Office 365 Sharepoint. In this article, we put three online storage services - Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft Office 365 Sharepoint - to the test and compare how they perform on different UK broadband providers.
The proliferation of broadband services with high download and upload speeds has made online storage services a viable, and arguably more robust, alternative to using USB sticks.
Online storage services have exploded in popularity since the launch of Dropbox eleven years ago.
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