Xerobank: How Much Bandwidth Do You Have?

I've been trying out Xerobank for the last 3 weeks, during which I've been lucky to have 150 kbps connections. Much of the time it's 50 kbps or lower with the xB VPN, whereas my ISP connection is usually 6,000 kbps to 11,000 kbps.

I'm using Windows XP Pro with SP3 and up to date patches. I've done everything I could find in under Support, including the faq, quickstarts, articles, troubleshooting, and helpdesk. Other than the routing table tweak (How to Prevent VPN DNS Leaks through TAP Adapters), there is not much else to do.

I haven't found much change is speed with different browsers. Speed measurements with xB Browser 2.0.0.20 and Firefox 3.5.5 are about the same, but are a bit faster with Opera 10.01. When comparing speeds, I always use servers nearest the exit nodes. I get about the same results with the xB Speed Test and SpeedTest.net. Whenever I test the speed, and any other time I've checked, Network Health is listed as excellent.

One day last week for example, without the VPN I have 6,000 kbps to 10,000 kbps, and with xB VPN connected it's been 50 kbps to 150 kbps. For each xB connection I get about the same results with US to US, US to US Turbo, and US to Canada. Most of yesterday with a 10,000 kbps to 11,000 kbps connection, I was getting less than 50 kbps with the xB VPN. At about the same time, I was measuring over 1,000 kbps using a free OpenVPN service I tried for the first time yesterday.

Are these speeds typically what I should expect from xB? If so, $35 per month is way too expensive for me.

 

Those are definitely not typical speeds.

When using Xerobank, I have almost no noticeable drop in speed. Basically I don't notice any difference. I easily get over 2MB/s (over 16000 kbps).

That is not to say that there aren't hiccups where my speed drops for whatever reason, and there are some other minor problems now and then, but generally my experience has been positive.

Where do you live? If you live far away from the exit nodes you are using, maybe you might notice some drop in speed, but it definitely shouldn't be anywhere near what you're seeing. If you're using exit nodes relatively close to you, you should see almost no drop in speed.

 

WTF?? Where do you guys live? I am in the U.S. and I get 3,000 kb/s with my bare connection. With XB2 I get anywhere from 700 to 1500 kb/s on average.

I am gaging this by my rapidshare downloads. Is that a reasonable way to measure speed?

 

Wow only 3000kb/s normally? That's some crappy service you have there. Who is your ISP? I'm in Canada..

 

Would you like to know my ISP provides 200kbit/sec?

 

Nope, Rapidshare doesn't always allow you to download with maximum download-speed. It depends from which (rapidshare)-server you're downloading from.

 

I download a 100MB rapidshare link in less than a minute. That is quite a bit faster than most people that I know.....here in the U.S. My ISP advertises a 20 Megs per sec connection and they are upgrading to a 30 Megs connection in December. Does 30 Megs mean 30MB? But anyway, when I watch my download through Rapidshare, with my bare connection, it varies usually between 1,000 kb/s and 3,000 kb/s (as shown in Free Download manager). I thought that was really fast....compared to most people I have met in the U.S.

 

See, I am a huge fan of my XB connection.... But it's definitely not because of speed.

Over here in asia pacific region, using a 20mbps connection the best i'll pull is 50kbps download speed, average more like 25kbps. Behind a 3g wireless connection, i'm lucky to pull 5kbps. That is not a typo.

Regardless, I am very happy with the product. Maybe some Asia-based nodes will go toward improving our speeds.

 

I would use it if it was not so expensive!

TH

 

You can soon. Steve has indicated they're changing the pricing structure.

 

That would probably be 30 megabits per second which translates to a theoretical speed of 3840 kilobytes or 3.75 megabytes per second

 

I only ment to say that RS has a whole farm of servers, and depending on load-balancing on their site, you wont always download from the same server, with ofcourse the same speed.

You could also test your download-speed through a website like speedtest.net.

 

Thanks for explaining that.

 

I understand about the servers being different. That makes sense. I have noticed differences depending on the link.

I tried that test and with my bare connection I got 21.73 Mb/s and with Xerobank I got 6.60 Mb/s. That was with the U.S. to Canada connection. It has been a little slower than usual though, so it would ordinarily do a little better.

 

So how much data can you download with Xerobank in a month 10 gig 100 gig?

where is steve these days?

 

Bandwidth is 75gigs/month, plus an encrypted email account, and hopefully sometime in the near future an online file storage account (that has been promised for some time now).

Also once you hit your 75 gigs, instead of being disconnected, you automatically revert to one of the "turbo privacy" nodes, which are single hop nodes, that are (usually), noticeably faster than the 2 hop nodes.

You can also choose the single hop, turbo privacy nodes at any point, and it won't use up your monthly bandwidth limit.

 

Xerobank's offer of encrypted email means your email messages are stored encrypted only, but they possesses the key to decrypt your message, hence you will have to trust them not to decrypt and read your messages. The "encrypted" in encrypted email means your message is encrypted in storage only. It is not encrypted during transmission. Hence it is not end-to-end encryption as typically associated with the term "encrypted email". A more appropriate term would be "encrypted storage for email messages where the service provider possesses the key to decrypt your messages".

Beverly Roberts

 

I've never paid much attention to XB's "encrypted" email, but I just looked at the site and it seems you are right. That's typical of marketing gimmicks from privacy services, but I would have expected better from Xerobank.

Welcome to Wilders, Beverly!

 

I'm pretty sure that Xerobank can't read your emails. , and even if they could, they wouldn't be able to associate your emails with you personally (all they have is your access account number, and no other information on you at all). However I would like for Steve to clear this up.

What I can say with certainty though, is that your connection TO their email servers IS encrypted for the entire duration that you're sending, receiving, and reading emails, which means that neither your ISP nor anyone else can read your emails.

Where you got this end-to-end encryption as "typically associated with encrypted email" I have no idea. I never assumed their encrypted email was like this for one minute. How would my friend who uses Hotmail be able to read my emails? If you want the actual email to be encrypted once it leaves the email server, you would use something like PGP.

For me, having an encrypted vpn to an email server (where the emails themselves are encrypted), so that my ISP or anyone else can't read them is what I need, and this is what I expected when I signed up for Xerobank.

 

If you are saying we are implying the internet itself is entirely encrypted like XeroBank, it is not. The internet is an unsafe place. So if you have a recipient outside of XeroBank, and you sent the email plaintext and didn't encrypt the content, then you would of course be sending the email plaintext... because you sent it plaintext. Naturally the context is still anonymized presuming you didn't break your anonymity by announcing your identity in the email as well.

When you connect to XeroBank's SMTP server, regardless if you are connected to the VPN or not, it requires TLS encryption. We will not allow you to send mail through us without using encryption and authentication. The connection to our email server is encrypted end-to-end, and stored encrypted on our system. That is what we mean by "encrypted email". If you have a recipient who is in XeroBank as well, the message is never transmitted in plaintext, and is fully sent and received encrypted end-to-end as well! The server's drives as well are also encrypted, so the message is stored encrypted.

I think in the future we will have a free service where anyone can get a free xerobank email address and use our server to send email to other xerobank users. That way everyone can have free end-to-end encrypted email.

 

It would have to be encrypted during transmission to their servers, of course, because you're using a VPN. But even if it's not end-to-end encryption, it probably doesn't matter to most users, as it's not needed for anonymity. The purpose of an anonymity service is to stay anonymous. Hence, most users probably will not want to attach any personally identifiable information to the e-mail. End-to-end encryption is for privacy, not anonymity.

 

I think no service out there beats PGP/GnuPG email encryption home growth in your own computer, it may take a little time to learn about public and private encryption keys but it is worth it and once you know how it works you do not need to trust anyone with your encryption keys other than yourself.

 

I'm probably thinking about this the wrong way, but how do you encrypt the server's drives? Am I wrong to compare it to a computer drive, so that if you encrypt it, it is inaccessible unless in use. In use, the drive has to be decrypted. So if the server drives are active, they have to be unencrypted? Again, I have no clue, so I'm asking. I'm thinking about this as if you were using TC or PGP on the drive. Once "mounted" for use, the contents of the drive are vulnerable.
I can see the value in encrypting all back up drives.

 

XeroBank's servers, as part of being FIPS-140, are naturally encrypted. The implementation depends on the role of the computer. Entry nodes have no userland-space, as they perform relay, so the OS I think is not encrypted, but the partition with interface to the rest of the network is. On exit nodes, the whole thing is encrypted I think. The place where memory is "decrypted" is in the physical memory (RAM) and I think keys for decryption are stored in volatile memory areas.