I benchmarked Aspera against alternatives for getting data from on-prem storage into the cloud (google cloud storage) a year or two ago on a 10Gbps link.
Aspera was faster on a single stream, but if you have a lot of files to move around (you usually do) you can just multiplex a bunch of tcp streams to get the same throughput.
So like in the example on their page, if you have 20 wget's hitting their ftp and there are no other bottlenecks, the throughput will be similar to using Aspera - and you have just a greater variety of free tooling for tcp based those protocols...
Sending on lots of TCP streams can get you to 80% line utilization if the drop rate is good and low. That's often good enough. On some lines, with the "wrong" number of TCP connections, the rate will oscillate, and you will be lucky to get 50%. Tuning that is a black art some people enjoy.
Yeah, I was probably working in an environment with pretty low packet loss.
Looking at the problem holistically - if you're going to spend money on Aspera to fix situations with high packet loss, maybe you're better off spending money on a higher quality connection and using tcp.
Yes, that works when latency is low. On trans-oceanic links you often have to take what you can get, drops and all, and physics has something to say about latency.
There is no reason fasp couldn't be reverse-engineered and deployed for free. But it involves real engineering. Once you did, you would have something valuable, and might be inclined to milk it. Aspera has lots of lock-in now for ancillary features of the product -- monitoring, encryption in flight, encryption at rest, bandwidth use scheduling, yada yada; but in the early days, competitors (Signiant, Riverbed) had all that, but not the flow control sauce, so failed on difficult routes. "Enterprises" like not to care about the difficulty of routes, and it's amazing how many consider the license cheap.
Even if you have only the one large file, can't you segment it? That's what I do for my consumer level use case anyway. Using a nonsegmented ftp client to download a file I get like 2MB/s, and when its segmented I max out my download rate at 20MB/s.
Aspera was faster on a single stream, but if you have a lot of files to move around (you usually do) you can just multiplex a bunch of tcp streams to get the same throughput.
So like in the example on their page, if you have 20 wget's hitting their ftp and there are no other bottlenecks, the throughput will be similar to using Aspera - and you have just a greater variety of free tooling for tcp based those protocols...