FINDING · EVALUATION

Direct circumvention via HTTPS/domain-fronting from Pakistan achieved an average throughput of ≈1.5 Mbps, whereas static proxies located in the US, Europe, and Asia yielded less than 0.9 Mbps in most cases. Page load times for the YouTube homepage (≈360 KB) were significantly lower under the direct method, and a TCP slow-start model predicts throughput could reach ≈2 Mbps if the flow completed within slow start.

From 2015-nisar-case — A Case for Marrying Censorship Measurements with Circumvention · §3.2 / Figure 1 / Table 2 · 2015 · Hot Topics in Networks

Implications

Prefer geographically proximate circumvention nodes over distant relay servers when the local ISP's filtering can be bypassed directly (e.g., HTTPS or domain-fronting) — round-trip latency dominates for sub-1 MB page loads.
Profile available circumvention paths dynamically and rank by measured throughput/latency rather than using a static relay list.