Client bandwidth: The forgotten metric of online storage providers

Since the inception of online storage offered by Amazon, implementations and technology have continuously improved the data centers' capabilities. However, in this paper, we will show that the perceived performance at the client is primarily dependent on the client's network capabilities and the network performance between client and S3. Without this knowledge, customers will continue to choose a supposedly faster data center or Online Storage Provider (OSP) with a higher associated cost over choosing a slightly slower data center that still fulfills or even exceeds the needs of the client at a much lower cost.