In short, if you’re a Virgin user and looking for an online storage service, Google is probably worth looking at! This level of difference might be expected when dealing wiht a very high bandwidth-delay-product, but all of the online storage services tested here had hosting locations in the UK. However, there are significant differences in the performance of Virgin’s fastest 350Mbps product - on Office 365 an average throughput of only 158Mbps was achieved, whilst on Google Drive the very same broadband connections averaged 338Mbps.
As might be expected, Virgin’s 200Mbps and 350Mbps products deliver the highest absolute throughput.
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Of course, these are just averages and could be skewed by a few outliers, so we will need to explore a few more charts to see if a pattern forms.Ĭomparing online storage providers by ISP and productįigure 2 below compares the average download speed for each of the major ISPs and products in the UK to each online storage service. The 36% difference between Google Drive and Office 365 Sharepoint is significant, particularly when dealing with broadband connections in hundreds of megabits per second. On average, Google Drive delivers significantly higher throughput than Dropbox and Office 365 Sharepoint. Initial comparisons of the online storage providersįigure 1 shows the average download speed achieved from each of the online storage providers. This allows us to generate high-level summaries, identify patterns and then perform a deep-dive into the results to understand the cause of these patterns. As always, we used SamKnows One, our web-based internet measurement platform, to analyse the collected measurement data. The findings below were obtained from a sample of 9,335 tests that were run across 165 Whiteboxes in the UK over a two-day period in September 2018.
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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