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56k Times Five: Myth Or Moneymaker?
maxentius writes "InternetNews.com has an article on not-broadband-but-still-faster telephone internet access premiering soon in more than one commercial ISP venue. Compression and other techniques will improve speed by up to five times, so they say. Hi-tech or hogwash?"
I don't care, I still want cable
By the time this is availible, broadband will be at the places they plan to cover.
I can tie up the phone line and go slowly (faster, but still slow) for a little less then to get the real thing. No thanks.
Another stumbling block on the way to 100% broadband coverage.
Its obviously transparent proxying and compression of data. If you download something like a long html document, you would probably see speed improvements - if you try downloading an MP3, you'll see no improvement at all. How do you compress what's allready compressed?
Nice Idea, but doesn't really do what it says on the tin.
Wouln't the constant compressing and decompressing contribute to latency? It must compress data by more than five times to compensate
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Well, I've got a 50/50 chance and I vote 'bunk'
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
So the ISP will be using compression when a user requests a page or file. This won't help in the speed of downloading already compressed files, only web browsing.
Email speed will stay the same.
Downloading compressed files will stay the same.
Browsing will be somewhat faster, but 7x is a stretch.
More than anything, I bet most of those $28.95/mo customers will be paying for the privilege of ~5min support response calls.
Definitely file this one into the "Hype" category of Hogwash.
This makes it impossible to cram more than 64Kbps into a phone call. Sure, you can compress the data, but once data is already compressed (as images, movies, and other things people usually want fat bandwidth for), it can't be compressed anymore.
Unless they dramatically change the analog phone network, which won't happen, this is a pipe dream. Sorry guys.
EarthLink Plus uses a proprietary "Web Accelerator" from Propel Software which reduces the size of Web pages and elements sent to users' browsers.
Sounds cool, but in reality it's just Lynx for OSX.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
I remember when 33 was upgraded to 56. It cost a lot. I'd like to see the cost of the new modems, when it comes to upgradeing hardware..
ps. My first time ever that I see a non commented slashdot post in 3 years
Hogwash. Because of the abundance of old infrastructure, telephone lines are limited to about 3KHz of bandwidth; by Shannon's law, this amounts to a channel capacity of just about 56k. As this is a theoretical limit, no amount of fancy compression can exceed it. There's also the fact that the FCC limits phoneline data transmission to about 53.3Kbaud...
If only I could get 5 times more beer for the same money. That's my kind of service.
My ISP just implemented such a thing, and as an ex-employee I got to beta test. All the beta testers signed up for the new service as soon as the testing period was over, which is $5 more a month than the regular dialup. So it looks like they're doing something right.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Even if it is 5 times faster than 56k (I doubt it), at $28.95/month it's too expensive compared to DSL and cable. If you don't use the web that much get a cheapo dialup at $15/month. If you use it a lot, get broadband. This falls somewhere in the middle. May be an option for broadband-willing people living in rural areas. /Claus
The key word in this article is web access. the only improvement you'll see is when you view web pages. I'm not so sure they can truly guarantee 5x speed.
"If it sounds too good to be true..."
Just because web pages load five times faster, do not assume your connection speed is five times faster. The basis of the Plus service is a web optimization proxy server that sits between you and web servers. It automatically reduces the size on images, compresses the text, and does various tweaks to squeeze more into your 56k.
Your MP3s and bad porn will still come across just as slow on your gnutella client. Sorry.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
This is silly. While it's fine and dandy that we can now crunch the data down even further and make it fly across our phone lines faster, this fails to address the real issue. Eventually we can compress no more, sorta like chip development. Smaller and smaller dies are great, but we need to focus on the long term future, not the next six to eighteen months.
Rather than working on compression, they ought to be working on expanding current broadband networks or developing the 802.16 standard or something. Faster phone line transmissions aren't going to be worth the effort in the end.
Or am I wrong?
Posting as directed.
Does anyone else remember the 24/96 modems that used to be sold? They were touted as "almost as good as" the true 9600bps modems. They used compression to achieve higher speeds which were actually just choppier and didn't seem much faster. Some of the original compression standards were MNP5 and later V42.bis.
If you really can't get DSL or cable fine. But in terms of browsing experience this won't come close.
While bandwidth heavy pages that happen to be compressible MIGHT load faster, access won't be always-on, and will be miserable if shared between 2 or more users...
My ISP, Cybershore in Connecticut, offers a technology similar to this. It uses compression, and is only available for Windows clients. I'm still waiting for cheap cable; I'm not willing to get broadband through SBC/SNET.
For $10 more... why not just get cable?
If you rmotfa you note that they partner with propel web accelerator. If I remember correctly there was some talk on /. earlier about them.
"If a quarter is two bits, then a dollar's a byte." -R Deric Miller
You find out that Earthlink isn't actually changing the dialup speed at the modem level .. they are just reselling Propel software's Accelerator product. Earthlink is charging a $7/month premium over their standard dialup, so Earthlink subscribers get a full $0.95 / month savings over simply buying Propel's offering.
I hope that EarthLink qualifies what they mean by 5x faster. They're probably talking about "user experience" speeds. Because, if you think about it, when we do backups, we use 2:1 compression as the "ideal," and everyone that's ever loaded Travan or DLT or DDS drives knows that when it says 200GB, it means 200GB compressed at 2:1. Short of some sort of very high-powered (in terms of CPU cycles) compression, 5:1 is almost impossible to achieve--certainly with desktop hardware, and probably not at all.
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
So I get to pay extra per month for them to compress webpage text on their end.
So yay, the text part of a webpage comes a little faster. So that 10k or so of HTML is 5x faster.
Those images, MP3s, streaming video, and all that are all already compressed (normally lossy at that)... I doubt they're gonna do much with that. And why on earth do you want something more than dialup if you're not using high-bandwidth applications?
What's sad is that people will actually pay extra for this.
So now that ADSL is picking up it's becoming slower since it's got more demand. Not to mention cable that, at least in Mexico, makes you browse in cache-land.
Now, let's see what good it really is and at what cost.
----
I see 57005 people
Perhaps they are using the Lzip compression algorithm to speed things up.
http://lzip.sourceforge.net/
Mod_gzip, anyone?
.zip/bz2/tgz files, JPEG/MPEG files... anything I can think of, that I'd want to get "faster", is probably already being compressed somewhere along the line. Possibly multiple times.
How does something like this work for things that are already compressed, like, say, anything that passes through mod_gzip, a V.44 modem connection,
The only ways I can think of to speed things further, at least in the case of images, is to resize cached copies, like AOL does, and that's just not a pleasant idea, or to apply some drastically better compression.
I don't think this is anything like it's cracked up to be.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I don't use my connection solely for web access; I've got lots of 0wn3d boxes to admin...
I wonder how well it will work for ftp too?
Doesn't look like a solution for the 56Ker unless you are web only.
This is just a compression and caching scheme. I don't think it will provide the kind of speed up people are looking for where it counts, i.e P2P and such. I mean sure they can compress your 50k web page to 10k, but they can't compress your 4M mp3 to 800k. It may improve web browsing, but as we all know well, that is a SMALL part of the broadband experience. When they can compress my 700 meg Divx movie to 140 megs, let me know.
Smart websites are already using mod_gzip, etc to compress their HTML anyway, so people won't see any difference there either.
To me, that doesn't sound very promising. Some kind of funky TCP/IP compression perhaps, but if it only applies to webpages, who gives a shit? Granted, it's be cool to load up webpages faster if you're on dial-up (heaven forbid flash-heavy sites), but what about all uses OTHER than the web? P2P? IRC? FTP?
For me, I'll stick with my cable modem and download as fast as you can say "free pr0n".
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
Why is obvious crap like this on Slashdot, while much more interesting and pertinent news is totally overlooked? (i.e., the DNS DOS on Al Jazeera)
How many times do we need to hear about unsubstatiated scientific and technological claims?
One fact I am compelled to revisit upon reading these press releases of "stronger, faster, better" technology, particularly that which is promised to be coming real soon now, is that virtually all recent advances in industry techniques have been incremental. This is not a claim that there is nothing new to be found in the business; rather, I am inclined to state that if you want to peer into the future all you need to do is apply a bit of chrome to today's offerings.
Case in point: while stories of (distant future) storage technology consistently fill all the typical industry rags, a very real technique is already available and well-known to insiders. DVDA, one of the newer ideas that has taken off, promises to roughly quadruple conventional hard-medium storage techniques. Although more prone to tolerance faults because the scheme involves replacing the typical single-head approach with four carefully-positioned around the box, the increase in input capability has lead many to believe that consumer demand for DVDA will rise rapidly as it begins to hit the shelves in larger numbers.
We've all chuckled over the "640K is enough for anybody" quote, but the reverse approach of industry visionaries who predict teraflops of holographic storage or similar pie-in-the-sky schemes is similarly unlikely to lead us to tomorrow's breakthroughs. Don't be fooled into thinking that we've fully exploited the potential of current techniques.
From the looks of the article, Earthlink bought a server-side web "accelerator." So, for that extra eight bucks (?) a month, you get http compression. And that's it. Everything else you do will still be terribly slow.....
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Did anyone find this odd?
:-)
want faster connections but aren't willing to pay for broadband
willing to pay for broadband? More like "unable to get broadband". Even though Broadband prices are quite steep, it's usually not a deterrant. No, the fact that most people have no choice is the real problem.
Now, put that in the context of the article. Who do you know that can't get broadband but can get a good dialup connection? Most of the time if a person can't get broadband, they can't get over 26K dialup either. Great, so some of my stuff is compressed, I'm still downloading a pokey rate.
Can't wait to find out how many people jump in on this one only to find they've been mislead
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I vote myth. Even 56K modems don't do 56K. Modems are dead, give it up.
-- OMFG = Oh My Floatse Goatse
Hogwash
There is only so much data that canbe stuffed through a telephone wire over a circuit-switched connection. People have been promising to speed up dial-up for years, and the story is always that they have a miracle compression system or a proxy system or even predictive proxying. Combinations of all of the above are promised as well.
The fact is that when you pull big data files that are already compressed, you can't do much to improve things. You are stuffing 8 great tomatoes into the itty-bitty can already.
I've been in the ISP business for about 7 years. There is just no miracle cure. Dial up is what it is.
FWIW, I believe it has legs even now. There is a large portion of the population that only wants email and stock quotes. Broadband, while it may be faster, is something that they don't want to fool with. Also, security gets to be an issue with always-on connections. $10-$15 dial up is a good deal for many people. $25.00 AOL is a ripoff.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
I met Kara the other day, and she's nowhere near as multi-talented as IBM would have you believe.
The article links to Propel Software. On their front page they claim their product can give a 5x speed improvement to a normal dial-up account.
This is not Earthlink providing new connection technology; it is simply a proxying/compression trick, hardly worth $7US a month.
earthlink uses propel accelerator, some program (clientside and isp-side?) that optimizes your connection (caches webpages, finetunes modems' settings).
nothing very exciting, this is still our good old 56k technology in action.
faster 56k's are still a myth.
but this offer, if Joe Modem turns out to be dumb enough to believe it's real, is a moneymaker.
Sounds suspicious at best. After all if it looks like crap and smells like crap, you shouldn't taste it.
"My God, this must be a truly remarkable corn chip, to be so widely and confidently touted."
My guess would be that they'll be using some sort of compression gateway that would proxy web/pop/etc traffic. The server would compress the traffic and client software would be responsible for uncompressing. Some of the compression is lossy (such as that on images) so the consumer will see lower quality images and the extra bits wont need to be sent over the wire. It's something used by many wireless carriers to increase the perceived throughput to tethered user. To the average consumer it *looks* like it's a faster connection, when in fact it's the same real connection speed, because of compression and unecessary packets never making it to their end.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They have invented a new text compression method that is analogous to the pscho-acoustic models used to remove the sound the human ear doesn't notice anyway.
Thy smply rmv ll f th vwls n th txt. Ths wy thy cn gt a hghr cmprssn rt.
Thnk f t ths wy: Thy cn cmprss t 11. The thr gys cn nly cmprss t 10. S, 11 s bttr thn 10.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
5x speed improvement with LYNX, perhaps?
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I haven't tested it yet, but V.92 is supposed to offer 60% more compression over V.90.. Many ISP's don't support it (not enough interest to upgrade equipment), however I did find one that incredibly cheap ($6/month!) and I'm connecting just fine without dropped calls. www.access4less.net And no, I don't work for them, just passing along some good information.
From the ZDNet.com review of Propel Software Accelerator
Editors' Rating 9.0
Interface and ease of use 10
Installation and setup 10
Service and support 7
Performance 9
Features 9
For years, frustrated Netizens have sought new ways to eke out a few more bits per second from their poky 56K connections. Most speed-up schemes (modem doublers, caching programs, and registry optimizers, such as Internet Rocket) generate a lot of hype but little else. Propel Software, on the other hand, offers a subscription service to boost your browsing that actually works.
When we used Propel Accelerator to download Web pages, they arrived two to three times faster than with a standard 56K connection. In some cases, pages displayed more swiftly than on a high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL). Truly, we were amazed. If you visit the same sites day in and day out--and your ISP budget isn't already stretched to the max--Propel is worth the $5 monthly fee. Keep in mind that it's no substitute for a cable modem or a DSL connection, and if you don't visit the same graphics-intensive sites often, this Internet-caching app's benefits won't be as compelling.
Easy does it
Propel offers the fastest, most painless installation imaginable. After downloading the file, simply click through the install wizard--no need to log off the Internet, close your browser, or reboot. The program simply places an icon in your system tray, and you're ready to go.
Propel works its internal magic in a handful of ways. On your desktop, it compresses graphics and other large files as they download, then decompresses them on the fly inside your browser. The program also caches the pages on your hard drive and updates only the data that's changed, so the same site will load even faster the next time you visit. The software also fools your ISP's servers into thinking you have a persistent connection (à la cable or DSL) by routing Web pages through the Propel network of servers, eliminating annoying dial-up time-out disconnections.
Speed you need
How fast is Propel? To test its speed, we timed a few graphics-intensive pages without Propel, then cleared our browser's cache before accessing the same sites with Propel. When we first visited CNET's home page using a standard 56K connection, the site took 24 seconds to download; using Propel, it took only 8 seconds. The next time we visited, Propel loaded the page in an amazing 4 seconds. The same held true for Amazon--20 seconds without Propel, 11 seconds with, and we eventually got down to an average of 6 seconds. These rates held their ground with a half dozen other sites that we checked. We even tested it using a supercheap ($7 per month) ISP account, and it worked just fine. But the software does nothing to speed up streaming media, file downloads, or POP3 e-mail connections--areas where broadband really shines.
Of course, the benefits of Propel vary depending on how you surf. If you visit graphics-rich (and painfully slow) sites such as ESPN.com, CNN.com, or MSNBC.com, it's a godsend. But if you spend most of your day doing Google searches, you may see little or no difference since Google is already quite fast.
Poor pics; no phones
On the downside, we ran into a few glitches using Propel. Page downloads occasionally stalled, and some pages displayed without any graphics. Propel was also slightly inconsistent; a page might load quickly once, then more slowly the next time. But hey, it's the Internet; bad things happen even to good connections.
Propel doesn't provide any phone support, either, just an extensive online FAQ and e-mail support. We e-mailed a question and received a response--from a human, not a computer--in less than four hours. That's darned fast. In any case, the program is so straightforward, odds are good that you won't need much support.
The next best thing next to broadban
I read a similar article in PcMagazine a while back. The technologies work in two ways. One takes popular websites and stores it in their own servers for supposably faster retreival. Sometimes you get faster results because of it, but only if their servers happen to be faster and the sites you visit are commonly visited (amazon.com, etc.). However, it usually isn't worth the $10-20 a month they service costs. The next option is to go with the compressing technique, which basically compresses graphics. A trip to the smithsonian (http://www.si.edu/) results in grayscale photos, but faster load times. Still, it relies on the speed of the servers, costs $10-20, and the benefits really aren't that great. In the end, I pay $40 for my broadband (since I also buy my cable tv from Comcast). I used to pay $20 for a second phone line and $20 for my ISP. To add another $10-20 would make a 56k dial-up connection cost $50-60 , or about the price of broadband for most people. Seeing as how broadband is FAR superior to speed-up services, and the total costs are the same, I proclaim these technologies to be HOGWASH, pure and simple.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Bitrate and bandwidth aren't being increased, so the connection isn't any faster. This will help people that just browse the web, but not gamers, IT people that work from home, those that like to download and upload large files, etc.
Okay, we've seen this enough.
-Compression won't do any good on the biggest bandwidth hogs: image, video, and zip files.
-Most dial-up ISPs already run caching software. Most browsers already cache images, etc.
And the American reason...
-If there was really a way to accelerate dial-up speeds by 5x without interfering with the downloaded content, some greedy businessman would already have figured it out and be charging a lot more than $10. And I mean besides blocking flash, Java, and animated gif advertisements at the server side. That's too easy and much too effective.
Actually I myself have been meaning to set it up for myself...
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
It's amazing, but true. You'd figure with the costs of bandwidth so much higher than the costs of cpu time that sites would, but it still seems to be one of those things that only those with a clue know about. I figure hosting companies don't want to tell customers because they'll lose out on the bandwidth revenue.
The Leknor gzip checker is a handy little tool to figure out who uses it, and how much sites that don't use would save by using it.
Propel et al are all just snake oil vendors who want your marketing data. All they run is a glorified proxy server that adds some compression (before the modem compresses the data anyway). At times their compression is counter productive and will slow things down. There's also a web cache thing on the client (which really isn't much better then the built in web cache.
What is evil is all of their customers and customer's customer's traffic is run though their servers. Just wait unti a customer stubles upon a golf site by accident and is soon deluged by golf related offers in their e-mail and on the phone. Of course Propel et al will utterly deny that the usage data is ever shared or mined.
This is going to come back and bite Earthlink.
Oh yeah, 5:1 is utter bullshit.
I'm a software guy, so I like to think you can do anything in software. But to be realistic, there are some things you just have to do in hardware. If the hardware hasn't changed (which according to the article: it hasn't), then it won't work as advertised for everything. Some things, maybe. But not everything.
"Let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average." - A. W. Tozer
Compression won't affect images (gif,png,jpeg,etc.) or movies because they are already compressed. It will help with the text and html but that's a small part of most web pages. So, while the speed gain may be five times for a plain text web page, for the cases where it really matters, images, movies, gzip compressed files, etc. there will be absolutely no gain.
Sounds to me from reading that somewhat inadequate article that it's all advertising hype.
They're claiming it will run 5x faster than 56k modem. Well, the thing is they're only employing compression technology to web pages.
So, it's still running at 56k. But webpages may download up to 5x faster, depending on their content.
The speed is the same, it's just web content is compressed. Which means if you get kazaa happy just thinking of this, remember that the compression is not going to compress content from kazaa (that and you'd be hard pressed to find something to compress oggs, mp3s and movies smaller than many already are).
Summary, speed the same, may appear faster, but this is mostly marketting hype.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Why can't we get korean style broadband already? 512kbs for $40 is teh sux when the koreans get 12Mbs for around $15.
By converting the images into a lossy, 256 color format. Yes, the webpage loads faster, but the images are limited to the color depth at which they're displayed. Basically, if you view a web page in 256 color mode, a true color image will be downgraded to 256 color mode. Which means that if you save the image, and later switch to a true color mode, you're still stuck with a pixelated 256 color image.
Also, while compressing html might be a good idea for viewing webpages only, it still won't help when it comes to downloading something like the linux kernel or mp3's - which are already compressed.
I've been to broadband and back to dialup for financial reasons, and 56k is fast enough for loading web pages. The real advantage of broadband is not the speed at which web pages load, but the fact that you can download large files (like ISO's and mp3's) that would otherwise be impractical with dialup. The fact that you can run a server is also a nice plus.
I applaud Earthlink for trying, but quite frankly, I don't think this is going to catch on. For the kinds of files that will be downloaded by the average broadband user, there's simply no replacement for large bandwidth. Nice gimmick, though.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Surely it could be both.
I've seen many people say this is bull (it will only help with text, etc..) and I agree 100%. However, the success of something is not always determined by what the smart geeks think of it, it's what the average (ignorant(paying)) consumer thinks. AOL tricked millions of people into thinking that their service was better than other ISP's when in fact AOL has generally been a few years behind the times, especially with email. So while this will only speed up the loading of text pages a little, the people(fools) who sign up will see that and love it, and try not to see the truth, that the extra money is a waste.
Umm.. don't look now, but there is a little bird passing you by at 100 MPH.
Broadband that works is the answer. Cable is the way to go for the time being. DSL is too limited and overpriced (most DSL tech know less than anyone I have ever seen) for the disservice that has been provided. Roadrunner may be a part of AOL/Time Warner, but it sure doesn't suck.
Most people who have had DSL have ended up frustrated by poor service, strange outages, little to no tech support, and extreme wait periods for connection (as in availabilty).
With Roadrunner, I was connected quickly (on a weekend when I was at home) - veruss a two month wait to get DSL, and even then they wouldn't be certain until they got to my home to verify if it was available.
I see to remember a whole lot of products that tried this with software all during the "dialup only" Internet era. It didn't really work well, because it relies on caching, compression, and "look-ahead". The "look-ahead" was supposed to follow links on the pages you were on to speed up access to those links. In theory - sounds great. In reality, people don't always surf like that, so it didn't really work.
Nice try, but I would wait and see before rushing off to scream "Yippee! I am almost getting broadband". Heck, even ISDN would be better than this in all probability. Why not just get two ISDN lines and bond them for that matter?
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
Or, at least there selling it like its available now.
Lack of creativity is no excuse for not having a
In order to get more ad revenue, Slashdot is changing it's focus to "News for Newbies, Stuff that Rules."
Most of the big stuff we transfer is already compressed and, unless modems have changed a lot since the olden days, they already do compression of anything that can be compressed. The only way to dramatically increase the amount of data transferred is to dramatically increase the connection speed.
While new compression schemes may be able to eek out a slightly better ratio, it certainly isn't going to be five times the current level. Local proxy stuff never caught on because people don't want to see the same crap over and over. They want _new_ data. For most single-user environments, a proxy actually slows things down as the proxy cache has to be searched before the request goes out to the net.
Meaning that your bandwidth remains at the same pokey 53K it always was.
Meaning that you don't wait for banner ads - they get downloaded in the background while the modem's idle.
Meaning it's nothing more than glorified adware/spyware.
Meaning it's the same crap you get spammed for every day.
On one hand, you've got the snake oil advertized by spams saying "ACCELER8 YOUR DOWNLOADS UP TO 5X FASTER 2DAY WITH ASSWARE!!!!11!1! qdicxrk", by trailer trash hoping make $9.99 once by selling spyware/adware/affiliate crapware to the clueless.
This is the same snake oil, except it's advertised by press release instead of spam, the trailer trash now wears a nice suit, and he's hoping to... make an extra $9.99 per month.
Margins on DSL are crap - at $30-50/month, they're losing money, but margins on dialup aren't much better.
Heavy dialup users realize that with DSL/cable at $30/month, and dialup at $20/month, they're better off with broadband. Infrequent dialup users are realizing that with competing dialup at $10/month, they're better off with $10/month dialup than the $22/month offering.
Consequently, the fat-margin $20+/month 2-hour-a-week dialup AOLusers and Earthsinkers (on which the "dialup ISP" business plan depends) are becoming a dying breed, leaving the suits desperate to try anything to boost margins among the decreasing dialup-n00b market segments, as long as they can, and by any means necessary.
With apologies to the President:
"Investors, I call upon you to see this for what it is. Do not sacrifice your hard-earned capital for the last gasps of a dying business plan."
Now they can just run those "Are we there yet?" commercials in fast forward.
And they'd save on advertising.
How much does a 5 second timeslot in an average cable company's timeline cost?
I got nothin'.
EarthLink Plus uses a proprietary "Web Accelerator" from Propel Software which reduces the size of Web pages and elements sent to users' browsers.
Okay, this is almost on-topic, but if 70% of pages weren't coded so badly with poor html tools that fill html code with useless extra text, textual parts of the web would load probably 5 times faster anyway.
Christ, the simple proper use of CSS instead of old-school font tags can reduce a page's size considerably. And you're browser will probably render it quicker, too.
Actually, I think html pre-cleaners at the ISP side would be kinda neat (as long as they can be disabled at the user's desire). Hmm... Microsoft could capitalize on FrontPage's shitty html-generation... they could optimize their server software to fix for their crap FP-pages....
Just ignore this post; it's more of a ramble than anything.
My stupid web site
Just look at a typical Slashdot page!
The HTTP standard allows for a client (like your browser) to tell a server that it supports compression, and then if the server wishes it can send back the content compressed with a header telling the client that it has been compressed, so the client can automatically decompress the content before display...
I think just about all modern browsers support this automatically, it's just a matter of doing the compression on the web server side. I'm not sure how many clients automatically send out the header indicating you can compress content though as I've not done a lot of testing around that. I guess you could just assume that everyone can deal with compression and just turn it on no matter what the client says, but that seems slightly evil.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Three years ago, I had a CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data - 19.2 kbps) Internet connection for my contract work. While I could do anything anywhere, it was slow - slower than a 28.8 modem, as should be obvious.
Fortunately for me, my wireless ISP offered a Venturi proxy. Routing web browsing, POP3, etc. through it, while still slow, became more bearable.
Retrieving log data (easily compressible) through the Venturi proxy had incredible speedups. For some tasks, the compression proxy made me feel like I was on dialup again.
Of course, the proxy could not cure CDPD's high latency - working in SSH sessions was painful.
These "compression" servers do two things. The first is standards or client based compression e.g. removing carriage returns from your HTML or using a client to pipe the text through a compression program and then decompressing that data at the client side. But the gains are pretty much all seen in the image compression. All the image compression does though is downsample your images to a lower rate, pixelizing the hell out of them and making them almost useless. This is a poor effort pimped by a marketing drone to keep customers from putting too much pressure on an ISP for broadband.
www.linux-skunkworks.com
The phone line is 64Kbps, but 8 of them are for control information (error control, routing, billing info, etc...) thus the 56K limit.
These guys are mainly going at SOHO and SMB markets through local resellers, they claim DSL speed with their proprietary system(derived from MidPoint?) and they have a free trial These are the same folks that brough out the Gekko flat-panel speakers that were hot for a while, and who do noise reduction on some jets and headsets... Oh, and don't forget to check Google
Sooo. I guess the overwhelmingly popular question will be "who has tried it"... I'll ignore the "faster pron" jokes that should show up every other post...
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
why don't they just focus on providing cheap DSL?
Repeal the DMCA!
Hmmm. You don't understand Shannon or bandwidth very well, or 56K technology.
Bandwidth on a pure analogue line is about 3kHz (typically 3400Hz); you have to consider the signal-to-noise ratio as well before you can give the theoretical limit. A typical S/N will be around 30dB, so you plug that in to Shannon's equation: Channel capacity = 2 * 3400 * log2(1+ 30) = 33688 bits per second.
56K technology is different; the upstream limit is still the theoretical 33.6Kbps as above. The downstream limit is 56K as the bitstream is digital and modulated in a different way so as to remove the analogue/digital conversion which is where the bandwidth limit restricts channel capacity.
The FCC limits the downstream rate to 53.3 to minimize crosstalk issues.
STF
From what I read in the article, it sounds like 5x would be a little overstated. They use Web Accelerator and web page compression to increase throughput. The actual amount of Kb/s doesn't seem to be any different, just that it's compressed. One would think this would require more overhead on both their side (to compress) and the user side (to uncompress), meaning page requests could seem much slower.
On top of that, it could increase loss of quality since I'd imagine they'd be using lossy compression on graphics and sounds. No idea where that "5x 56k" number comes from... maybe if you browse nothing but text-only transcripts of Dr. Seuss stories.
Is it really worth $7/mo more for them to compress content for me?
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
It supposedly works by doing:
* Compression. Propel Accelerator delivers text and graphics more efficiently, using a proprietary compression technology
This won't work with already compressed images unless it reduces the quality or resolution.
* Caching. Propel Accelerator intelligently retains and re-uses Web pages and page elements that have previously been sent to your PC. That's why the longer Propel Accelerator is in use on your PC, the faster your Web pages will load.
Nothing a simple proxy server doesn't already do. It may do pre-fetching of links but that won't improve the net throughput of your pipe.
* Persistent Connections. Propel Accelerator uses proprietary techniques to carefully manage and optimize the communication between your modem and our network of servers through a persistent connection. This eliminates the time wasted re-establishing and closing TCP/IP connections.
Internet Explorer already got in trouble by doing this. Leaving the TCP/IP connect unclosed violates standard practices and will only improve web speed if the server is running IIS since it expects IE to do this same trick.
Overall it's all really just a bunch of caching with maybe some pre-fetching thrown in. Just up your browsers cache settings and enable Mozilla's multiple pipe feature and you're set.
Nothing but a waste of money.
This place has been selling a similar service called "Velocity Access" for well over a year now. They claim 6x instead of 7x.
Why? Check THIS crap out. Everything else they sell is basically crap (used hardware as new, etc..) and their ISP is a complete patch job.
And no, I'm not talking about Fry's. But.. "DSL Buster?" heh.
Sorry, modems are still slow.
This can never work.
( 280)(1024)b=(1000)(1000)s .28672=s/b
.28673, this plan is obviously doomed to failure.
If we assume their example,
56K Times 5 = Moneymaker
5(56Kb/s)=MM
280Kb/s=MM
280Kb=MMs
and since s/b is actually
Best Windows Freeware
What's the big deal? The modem already compresses data on the fly, and some webpages already come .gz compressed. Standard text data compression is pretty old science, and from what I can tell, this won't do a damn thing to speed up images, a single one of which typically is larger than the entire html file.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
V.9x modems (56kb standard) use standard V.42/V.42bis data compression. Compressing data further over this might reduce the efficency of the modem as is.
Someone you trust is one of us.
But then again I live in the UK, where broadband is still in its infancy.
I could get ISDN at 128k, but ISDN isn't a 24/7 connection, and i'd have to pay more than the lucky few that can get a permanent broadband connection, and thats before I include any online time charges I'd have to pay for, which equate to over £1/hour.
Funny how BT reckon that 80% of the UK can now get broadband, despite the fact that of all the tech savvy people I know, only 20-30% can get it in their area.
Go Figure
Nothing magic. It compresses a whole page, images and all, on the ISP side, and sends it down a persistant pipe to your client, along with some more intelligent caching information than is default (ie, the
It would probably 'look' faster since the whole page is delivered in one package, and renders all at once, rather than having text and waiting for images to show up.
It only accelerates HTTP AFAIK, so it's useless for anyone but the mom and pop web browser. It's certainly no substitute for bandwidth. The joe users buy broadband for P2P and streaming video and VPNs, none of which this 'technology' helps.
It also sounds like it would require client side software. Support? "Windows 98/NT 4.0/2000/ME/XP (sorry, no Macintosh support yet." which goes without saying.
Which brings me to a question. I regularly route my web browsing through my squid proxy at home (through ssh). Since my home uplink is 15k, it throttles my browsing. Is there an open source clone of this, or something similar?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
As modems have tiny little CPUs in them, and very little memory, the V.44 and other compression schemes they use are not very effective. Zip, Compress, and other host-based compressions algorithms which require much more memory and cpu than V.44 and friends always compress much better than the modem's compression.
Is that there is no real support for gzip in the standard. You'd think they'd include this to keep bandwidth usage down, but I guess they'd make less money that way.
It's just web! Hell, web access isn't a big deal over 56K. It's other things, like FTP and Terminal Services, and proprietary stuff (like Kazaa). This is 100% useless to me. I'll stick with my 56K, thank you.
It's called mod_gzip!
As for images, learn how to compress them properly (best quality with the smallest size, not hard), eliminate any unnessary html and dialup is not so painful.
Leave broadband for music and video, normal webpages work fine on dialup providing you code your pages correctly.
The software solution may seem to help with some computer setups, but that's because many computers are misconfigured: a 56k modem with compression needs to be hooked up to the computer at 230kbps or 460kbps because when the modem performs the decompression, it will need to send a high-speed data stream to the computer. The best solution for those high data rates is to just get a modern USB modem.
Most of them will see the numbers and the hype and believe it. But, as many others have said, it IS a myth. Don't believe it? Try this:
If you are a Linux user:
du -h
Tar and gzip the folder, then do a vdir on it.
What do you see? Same size? Possibly even larger?
If you are a Windows user:
Right click and get properties on a folder full of mp3s or oggs.
Zip it up and compare the zip file's size with the size of the original folder.
Again, what do you see? Same size? Possibly even larger?
Like someone else said, you can't compress what's already compressed.
Un-news
That was my first question, of course.
From Earthlink's FAQ:
What are the minimum system requirements for EarthLink Accelerator?
EarthLink Accelerator works with most Microsoft® Windows(TM)-based personal computers in use today, including virtually all PCs purchased within the last 4 years.
Platforms
Windows 98/NT 4.0/2000/ME/XP
Browsers
IE 5.0 or later
Netscape 4.7 or later
MSN Explorer
Is EarthLink Accelerator available for Macintosh?
Not at this time.
http://bermangraphics.com/tips/vision.htm
This is not exactly new tech here. Many wireless providers, such as Voicestream/T-Mobile/whatever they are called this week, use this accelerating proxy for PDAs and laptops. They will actually attempt to re-compress and re-size many of the images from the websites. They also strip out "redundant" information from the HTML.
For the image recompression, they can also convert the image to B&W (user setting) for additional compression. Based on this, I would say the 7x faster web page download is possible, but at a significant quality loss.
Looks like Earthlink is just using an existing wireless product for dial-up.
On a side note, most of the accelerating proxies I've gone through have usually managed to mangle our XML SOAP stream to the point where we actually have to use a different port to avoid it.
More server admins should turn on Apache mod gzip. Browsers support it (including your favorite!). So, earthlink is going to just pull an AOL on you and is going to cache the page and gzip if for you. Whooo hooo. Seven bucks more for stale, but faster pages.
Wow, all we need to do is combine this technology with this technology and we'll have our information before we even load the browser.
But are POP, SMTP, and IMAP normally compressed? Since mail docs are mainly text and aren't latency sensitive, a 75% compression would be plausible for some kinds of content.
Still, this is obvious enough that I imagine at least some mail systems must be gzipping the connection.
This being Slashdot, I'm sure someone knows all about this. I'd love to hear details about where and how compressed mail is used.
My video compression blog
Far be it from me to support Frogreich, but we won't be serving Stuffed Freedom Toast there anytime soon.
We're only doing in Iraq what should have been done in Germany in 1938. No more.
Who said myth and moneymaker are mutually exclusive?
Propel Fitness Water = "Turbocharged" Water
We're doomed.
Here's the "technical overview" from the Propel site.
http://www.propel.com/ac/tech.jsp
i work for earthlink and they are coming out with a product similar to this called propel. www.propel.com (i think). Its just basically a fancy chache system w/ some form of compression. but it wont make binary files any faster. Just seems like another money making gimick to me.
While it's possible to do 5:1 on some HTML stuff, that assumes that mod_gzip or other compression schemes aren't being used.
And for images, they're presumably just reencoding them at a higher compression ratio, ala AOL. Which can work if you prefer crappy quality, faster.
But TANSTAAFL always applies.
My video compression blog
Apache supports HTTPZ so does netscape.
GZIP everything you send over HTTP.
Broadband users are worried about MP3's, sharing video, and clients who mail them 100MB zip files of photoshop documents. Surfing faster? Sure, it would be *nice*, but it is by no means the reason to have broadband.
.5 second reload.
Earthlink is right, this is a step towards a better dialup but with no risk of taking a chunk out of their Comcast DSL market.
I can't think of any reason why HTML compression and intelligent caching can't be used in a broadband connection to make that 1 second reload of slashdot a
The ______ Agenda
5x faster SPAMing from dial up IPs
So, it sounds like they're doing
gzip or equivalent of the HTML at the proxy (hence faster HTML and browser-based email, which is really HTML)
Recompression of images at a lower quality. Nasty quality hit there, but can be better for some stuff. If they were truly bold criminals, they could switch to formats with superior compression efficiency, like going GIF to PNG, or JPEG to JPEG2000.
My video compression blog
Better yet, use SVG in your pages instead of flash (if you *must* have annoying animations)
SVG is cool, it's XML, and it can be gziped on the fly.
Even better yet, use SVG instead of PNGs for your silly little graphics.
Zoom, Zoom, bandwidth friendly, standards (and buzzword) compliant!!
You are talking about lossless compression and you are completely correct that 5:1 lossless compression isn't ever going to happen. Entropy of normal network data is too high, 5:1 would be many standard deviations from the real world. On the other hand, if you read the article carefully, they state that it is UP TO 5:1 compression for web and email only. This will be lossy compression on images, which make up a bulk of the data in web conditions. Much like a web proxy for a mobile phone browsing situation. E.G. with my t-mobile phone proxy, I get the full real web page (not WAP) but all of the images have been reduced to about 64 colors and had their resolution reduced by the proxy before they make it to my phone. I think this is great because most web pages are about 1/8th their size so it saves me money and time when I don't care all that much about browsing images on my phone (but they are nice to have). In this case up to 5x faster is much more probable, especially when you throw in the force majeure clause of "up to". Of course, I'm a geeky engineer with broadband and I'd never buy this crap anyway. =) Have a nice day.
--Let's hack root on 127.0.0.1 --panZ
Just another supposed stop-gap measure, but one has to wonder, if such compression/sneaky techniques were available in the past, why were they not implemented? Just like IP over power lines. Like THAT is gonna happen!
Caching could clearly work (wouldn't it be great if your ISP had gnutella nodes ?) but this raises some important legal issues - these days ISPs don't have much legal trouble for transparently allowing users to download pirated content, but as soon as they cache p2p trafic Hillary's with her army of lawyers is gonna be after them
The Raven
Yep, your file will go through at 0.9x of the regular speed (slower). This is less than 5x faster, so they win! All they are guaranteeing is a maximum speed (5x faster), and that's not hard to do. Stupid, yes. Truth in advertising, yes.
The vast majority of 56k modems already do compression, CSLIP compresses headers, and HTML compression is already built into modern browsers. What's left is caching, image-size/quality reduction, and pop-up blocking. AOL already does two of those three - take a guess which two!!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Let me see a demonstration of a .jpg, .mp3, or .7z file being sent 5 times faster and I'll switch.
Random ASCII data is not a text file, it's a binary file. A text file typically only contains the characters you can type with a keyboard, plus a few special characters like carriage returns and tabs. Also, most text files contain words primarily in one language which causes some characters to appear much more frequently than others. This allows those frequently used characters to be represented by only a couple of bits rather than an entire byte.
Most text files compress extremely well, I frequently see text files that are compressed to roughly 20% of their original size.
I'm skeptical of their ability to significantly compress graphics and other multimedia components of pages because they're usually already compressed.
Now, as for the technology as a whole, if you go to propel's general Technical Overview, You'll also see that it's not just a compression technology, it's also proxying and caching technology. They have a local http proxy with a persistent connection to their remote proxys. This should also give a small performance boost.
To me it sounds like it could significantly increase web browsing speeds. I just don't think it's worth paying the extra cash if you can get broadband in your area for a few bucks more per month.
One thing that I think they should implement if they haven't already is predictive caching. They should try to guess where your next click is going to be and start downloading that content to your proxy in advance of you hitting it. This can be especially effective in an environment with a large userbase where they can predict your next page based on other users' behavior.
In most cases people do not even connect at true 56k, but rather, something between 33.6k and 56k.
People in my city mainly connects at 24000-31200 (about 3KB/sec for compressed files).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You forgot the bit where you can't connect over 52kpbs... power limits, if I remember. Even 56k isn't quite truth in advertising.
Because when I push it to 7x, it crashes.
That reminds, me... sure wish someone would come up with a trick for existing connections like the kermit protocol. It was so cool to watch simultaneous d/l and u/l that actually made data transfer BETER than if they were done one at a time.
However, I stress that I want something LIKE kermit for existing lines... my nostalgia does not win over my love of my 1.5M line, not by a long shot
I just read slashdot at +5, and hide all stories by CmdrTaco. The former guarantees I only read really good tripe and the latter eliminates redundant data.
Don't most modern web browsers support gzipping the webpage before transit? I would think that would be 90% of the compression this "new" technology would give... I've hardly ever seen it used though... Any ideas why not?
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
What's to be impressed about? Connectivity that tops out at less than 300 kbps for nearly US$30 per month? Where I live, you can get 3 TO 8 TIMES that speed over DSL for around the same price (acually slightly less costly) with DSL. The real solution is to find a way to stop Americal ISPs from completely ripping off their broadband customers. I think the telecommunications industry and regulations in the US are deeply flawed if ISPs can get away with selling crap like that for such a high price. Time to look at how things work here in Canada or perhaps in parts of Asia and Europe.
Furthermore, if it's simply data compression techniques implemented with the same old 56K modems and lines then it's crap--most data pumped over the line when you surf the net and speed matters is already compressed--be it GIF, PNG and JPEG graphics, MP3s, MPEG video, Microsoft updates and so on. The only way that can be compressed further is with lossy compression (can't do that with code anyways). User's either get the same cruddy speed or a lousy multimedia experience.
Even though we here in Canada are led by a doddering, senile old coward prime minister who can't/won't help our neighbours in a time of need, I suppose at the very least Canadian ISPs can manage to offer REAL consumer broadband for US$30. *sigh* Nope I still feel ashamed of our leadership or lack thereof...
Unfortunately, the standard install of IE 6 supports Flash out of the box but not SVG.
On the other hand, these Mozilla builds do support SVG.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If the simple compression can be done by a proxy-server, why not just do it on the original files? I mean, html files can be sent zip-compressed. Music sent as flac instead of wave (still lossless, or ogg if you want more). Png instead of bitmap and so on. Any significant amount of compressability in the content is a huge flaw, as bandwidth has always been the bottleneck since they first connected two computers together. The machines themselves could easily compress/decompress in the time saved...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
XWebs!
it's $5 more than the regular service. it does work, sort of. it's basically a proxy that compresses images and text before they are sent to your computer. it speeds up web page loading, but nothing else. and if you choose a high enough compression level to make a real difference, all the images look like crap. i don't really think it's worth it, it won't speed up your pr0n and mp3 transfers at all, and face it, you wouldn't be using the internet if you weren't a pervert and a music pirate, now would you?
I've looked into this technology for folks that have access to neither cable nor dsl internet access (these people do actually exist, in fact there a quite a number of them out there). As has been pounded into the ground above, this technology isn't anything fancy. it essentially passivly compressy html, word and excel documents. for the average user pretty much everything else is compressed already. What this means to anyone unwilling to spend a few extra bucks for broadband is it's not worth it. what this means to anyone unable to spend any amount of money for broadband (because it doesn't exist in their area) is it's probably not a bad option for folks already spending 23 bucks a month for their aol account. unless all they do is look at porn (or anything else that's image heavy) or download audio (as if any large number of people do this anymore).
On to the regulatory part: Now that RBOCs don't have to share DSL and would have to compete against cable on price I think we're going to see almost NO growth in the geographic areas where DSL or cable are offered. That means a chunk of folks out there are never going to do better than this. If I was one of them (and thank my lucky stars I am not) for five extra bucks I'd say why not?
Unless they use some kind of low-grade DSL with a special modem, it's pure snake oil. What do they expect to happen when you run a GIF through this thing? It's already compressed, and if they had a compression algorithm that was 5 times better than LZW, they'd have already... (close your eyes a second) patented it (open them again).
Maybe some HTML would benefit from this, but the bulk of what makes pages slow to load is graphics and craplets (a catch-all term coined by a former co-worker that was originally applied to useless Java animations, but could be extended to include Flash, embedded media-player MIDI, etc). Most of that stuff is already compressed.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
... in Canada.
"It costs $28.95 per month, $7 more than standard dial-up"
I pay CAD$34 for a 1Mbs DSL line with static IP and 20GB allowance. That's about USD$22. I can get a 3Mbs connection for CAD$50 (USD$33). This seems a trifle expensive to me.
Number one it is not compression. Add blocking +
site cleaning I would love to run. Site cleaning fixes some page saving data.
I have seen this many times the Site name dir to base of the page is not required and is just junk. Basic you modem is not fully used due to downloadling junk embed in web pages. Meta data is also junk. Image compression is a bad thing due to the fact that you get more speed less image data not as good picture.
Basic all it does it get you max use of your downloads I would thing broadband users would be more intrested in this due a lot of them paying fo r so much downloads.
Also on the ads it would pay to take a close look to make sure they are not taking the webpage ads out and puting theres in the place. This works higher speed less net travel less time between the send and responce time sooner thay are downloaded.
Anything slower than T3 is not "broadband", it's "midband". Broadband is the buzzword du jour, but it's not the right buzzword.
Or am I missing something and a cable modem *is* fast enough to be transparent?
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
56k IS a broadband technology. People just misuse the word broadband today.
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Canadian company doing something similar, on the fly text compression, although with more interesting algorithms: http://www.slipstreamdata.com/compression.html
But only when running down from an airplane.
More seriously, I think when they're saying up to 5X, they mean "If your web page has images/ads we already have in cache, and you have repeatable text/html we can optimize, it could be 5x faster."
paintball
I just wish I had my SDSL again. I had 802/802 for $40/month(telocity) -- now I have 384/384 for $40(isp)+$40(verizon) and Verizon says it can never get faster because of the cabling between me and the CO.
Or, perhaps, someone could start a new ISP and work a deal with World Wide Fiber (goal: fiber to the end-user).
Mal
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
I thought They already had an implimentation of this. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/08/137246
mod_gzip anyone ? ;-)
Does this mean we'll get double posts double fast? :/
My dog ate my sig.
comparing your subject to your comments, you've shown that the grammar school rule of "sometimes y" applies to their methods of compression, how astute of y.
I would have compressed the above text similarly, but my software couldn't interpret stt to be astute.
I hate all sigs, even this one.
Sounds like rproxy.
http://rproxy.sourceforge.net
And if the compression is streaming, it is likely to increase the size of compressed files slightly.
Yeah, by 0.1 percent, big whoop. And what about turning off the compression for audio/*, video/*, application/zip, and other MIME types known to be compressed?
I wonder if it will even recognize gzip'ed, bzip'ed or PGP/GPG encrypted data and skip the compression. I wouldn't bet heavily on all three.
Given that the technology already checks the MIME type and applies different recompressions to HTML, images, and Flash animations, why wouldn't it special-case common compressed or encrypted MIME types?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Don't the two coincide pretty often?
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
What if they have a better compression algorithm that makes the image smaller while retaining quality? JPEG is widespread and standardized but it is not "king" in terms of modern image compression performance. They probably have a transcoder which translates between JPEG and whatever their proprietary format is, with as little degradation as possible. Even a 5-10% savings would make a difference.
Leaving the TCP/IP connect unclosed violates standard practices and will only improve web speed if the server is running IIS since it expects IE to do this same trick.
I think what they probably mean by this is a persistent connection is maintained between the client and the transparent proxy, *not* between the proxy and the external server. Notice they said "optimize the communication between your modem and our network of servers." This is actually a really good idea since it avoids the overhead of building up and tearing down a TCP connection to the proxy for each web request. The external web server has no idea this is going on; it's something happening between the Propel office and the home user.
For $10 more... why not just get cable?
In some markets, a cable Internet connection has a one-time setup fee of $200,000 to relocate the subscriber's family out of a non-serviced area into a serviced area.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
According to their faq, it delivers speeds 'up to 5 times faster' than standard service. Unless they're retarding the standard service, I'm not sure how they're going to further compress a graphic. They sounds like they are eliminating some TCP/IP negotiation by maintaining connections, but then I sped up my TCP/IP negotiations by switching off of IE.
----------- Sig what?
Why they just can't improve the way that the modem sends the data. Like use many many "tones" sorta like DSL does...but audio. I'm guessing all the analog to digital conversions that most phone companies use mess things up.
I kind of doubt it - that would be a bit processor-intensive on their servers. I think they-re just re-compressing whatever comes along without regard to what it is. This at least eliminates any image decoding step, and and file-extension issues. As I recall, better compression (at a constant detail loss, of course) = more processor overhead too.
I could be wrong tho.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
What absolute illogical nonsense on your part. They claim up to 5x faster. You provide a single example where it won't go any faster. That is like my car - which claims to go up to 180kph - so I drive it around town at 60kph and deduce that the 180kph claim is false. Illogical. Nonsense.
Getting up to 5x faster is possible, doable, and pretty much every Linux geek already does it. Install a proxy. Use heavy caching. Use persistent connections. Use mod_gzip. On HTML I can and do get 5x faster transfers. On MP3s there won't be any speedup (probably a latency increase if anything) but their website already says that.
They never claimed 5x speedup on everything. Only up to 5x speedup. They are right. You are wrong.
Bright sites, unfortunately, show very little improvements.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"Myth or Moneymaker?" To assume that being one of these entails not being the other gives consumers too much credit.
There is no reason to charge extra for this.
However, if this proxying & compression really works so well, why
not build it into the HTTP specifications?
AOL's proxy server recompresses images into AOL's proprietary .ART format. Just do a quick Google for AOL's .ART format and you'll find how much of an annoyance it is for web designers since it tends to overcompress everything and introduces a lot of distortion and artifacts into the images.
Before I read the article, I thought this was going to be a new technology that actually crams more bits per second down the pipe, but since it's just compression based, it's nothing new, just Earthlink playing catch-up with AOL.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Federal law prohibits 56K modems from running faster than 53k. The government is afraid you'll electrocute a phone technician or something.
With networks, a kilobit is generally 1000 bits. 56K modems are 7 bits at 8000 Hz, which comes to 56,000 bits per second.
Let me acquaint you with the phrase on average... nah, you're too fucking stupid.
You know those internet accelerators? Do you know how they work? It's teh same idea, info gets sent to them, compressed, and sent to you. Then your software decompresses. Of course the ISP probably won't have spyware in it, but they'll probably track where you go for marketing purposes like other ones.
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
It's basically the same technology as DSL only cheaper. They've actually had this for years even before DSL, only the FCC restricts top phone speeds to 56K...until now.
Because of the filters they have on legacy phone infrastructure, you can't get more than 3KHz of bandwidth reliably over a phone connection. Given the not-very-good SNR of the phone system, this results in a channel capacity of just about 56k by Shannon's laws.
This is a fundamental limitation; even with a *perfect* (i.e. completely non-redundant) coding scheme, you couldn't exceed this capacity. On top of that, the FCC limits phone modems to about 53.3Kbaud. The only way to make it appear as though you have a faster connection is to eliminate some information from your data stream.
Less seriously I think they mean "If your web page is already in our cache, and is being served normally from a C64 in Afghanistan which is currently being slashdotted, it could, possibly, be 5x faster, or even more!"
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
We've implemented an appliance similar to this, but on the other side of things -- in front of our web servers. We host a lot of different stuff, but you'd know the name / been to the sites if i mentioned them.
These reverse proxies (from redline networks) maintain persistant connections to our servers and compress in realtime in gzip or deflate -- depending on the requesting client.
I was a bit skeptical at first, but even after binary content, we saw two things:
Load times (dialup mainly) cut by at least several times. Load times of up to 18 seconds on dialup were reduced to about 3-4 seconds. DSL customers experienced a little faster load times, but the factor is nearly meaningless at high speeds.
About a 50% decrease in bandwidth consumption, which was drastic considering we push gobbs of megabits through these sites alone. This can pretty much delay the need for ordering extra connectivity, especially when you dont really need it if you compress.
Sure, it does take time to compress data, but this time is pretty much nonexistant, especially given the load times we witness in the real world.
Its really cool to see this implemented on the dialup side...thats gotta be really fun for dialup customers.
The standard is long since complete - ISO standard since December 2000. QuickTime for MacOS X has a good implementation of it. And yes, it has both lossless and lossy modes. And yes, the core coding scheme is license and and royalty free.
http://www.jpeg.org/JPEG2000.html
I'm really looking forward to JPEG2000 for digital cameras, since instead of having to cache thumbnails, applications like iPhoto can just decode the wavelet subbands appropraite for the current resolution. Much faster than having to decode the whole JPEG and then cache a thumbnail. Browsing an iPhoto library with 2000+ files strikingly slow, and surprisingly fast considering the math that is going into it.
Still, PNG will probably be better for synthetic graphics like screen shots, where JPEG2000 will be better for natural images.
My video compression blog
Since AOL funds parts of the Mozilla project and Winamp.
What.. is it a coincidence that Mozilla competes with MSIE and Winamp competes with Windows Media Player?
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Their HiSpeed is supposed to run at a MINIMUM of 2.5MB/s. I'm in the situation of actually having BOTH CABLE (HiSpeed) AND ADSL right now, and my non-rigorous testing shows that ADSL is faster than CABLE by a factor of about 2.5 for downloading from Linux to OSX. With ADSL operating about 1.7MB/s, cable isn't half of what it claimed in the advertisement.
As far as lightspeed is concerned; well, if it really WAS 5 times the speed of a 56K modem, then I can't see why I would need anything faster. The stuff I do at home doesn't demand bandwidth, just the AVAILABILITY of the internet at a "decent" download speed, so that I can read news, etc.
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There are some proxy projects that do those kinds of things already, for example:
WebCleaner is a filtering HTTP proxy. It can disable animated GIFs, compress documents on-the-fly (with gzip), add/remove HTTP headers, and remove unwanted HTML (adverts, Javascript, etc.). It can be customized to your needs.
Only thing you have to do is install it somewhere on a faster system and let your dail in connection use that proxyserver. I also saw a proxy server that could degrade the quality of the pictures a bit, thus saving even more bandwidth, could be this one, but check freshmeat if you're really interested.
How do we end up with these acronyms? Don't people do any research before they try to start using acronyms already in use. [I mean, hell, anyone else remember all of the confusion of trying to explain the concept of ATM networks, without having to explain every other sentance that it has nothing to do with getting money].
As for DVDA, these folks have obviously never seen Orgazmo [I mean, try reading the above message with the other meaning of the acronym]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Exactly,
Any statistics on how many web sites are/aren't using this?
My video compression blog
In Winnipeg, Manitoba, our DSL and Cable internet providers have a lightspeed, or lite speed. a.k.a. 5x dialup speeds. That 5x dialup is based on a 28.8kpbs modem, not 57.6kpbs modem. So yeah 12-15KBps is about the top end on those accounts.
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
As other comments have pointed out the obvious flaws, I'll just add that they still haven't even tried to address another major issue, which is latency, the bane of web surfing and game playing.
The issue with the extra powr going through the lines is that the FCC is woried about cross talk...
If you have a lot of older lines (old punch blocks, etc), it's not twisted. As there's no twist, there's no counter EMI [as you create a magnetic field whenever you have a changing electrical field] The EMI then induces an electrical field in the neighoring lines.
So well, you start having problems in old neighborhoods [old in terms of the age of the phone lines, not necesarily the age of the homes], where modems cause noise on voice lines, and two modems may cause interference with each other.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Not only that, but the PPP protocol itself supports compression, and is enabled by default on most versions of Windows.
My journal has hot
No ammount of hocus-pocus is going to speed up the 64k channel of a POTS line... 8000 PCM codes per second -- if you're lucky, the modem will be able to use 6 bits per code.
Stac compression within PPP has been around for a decade. Why is this suddenly something I have to pay for? Bellsouth.Net intentionally disables software compression to "reduce the time it takes to connect." Obviously, the time it takes to negotiate CCP -- some almost unmeasurable fraction of a second -- is very important; those are bytes of pr0n you could've downloaded. I have an ISDN line; it takes 3 seconds to login... all 3 of those seconds are spent waiting for an IP address (IPCP). Calling into work takes less than a second and it's bonding both channels and negotiating several other options bellsouth will never enable.
Despite my previous message, this is correct.
Myth Or Moneymaker?
Who says it can't be both?
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
I thought Hebrew as older than AOL. I'll go check. Ah, yes this has been done before
Regular Hebrew and Arabic text is written without (most of) the vowels, which results in ambiguity. The average number of readings of each word is about 2.4, with some words having up to 8 different readings. The only way to disambiguate the words is using context.
This might be rough on a computer, but it could work. Quickly file a patent application for this great new electronic idea and tell them Jeff Beazulbub sent you.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
So we, at slashdot, all know that it's a bunch of BS. The general public, however, doesn't and seems to live for "The next great thing".
So I think it's possible for the standard to be both a Myth and a Moneymaker.
Seriously! The uninformed masses just love buying into marketing hype.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
For a while, modem speed (like everything else) kept getting faster and faster. But it seems to have topped out at 56K for the last few years. Have we just reached some physical limit?
i'll make you a trade......you keep bush, we'll keep your prime minister : )
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
The problem is that those that are too far from a switch for DSL, and aren't covered by cable modems, are still too far from a switch (or on crappy old copper) for 56k.
If it won't be available to those who can't get broadband, what's the point?
A semi-related story... I have a Samsung N400 from Sprint with the data cable (dial #777, turns your phone into a PPP device, but the speed is over 128k with latency anywhere between 300 and 800ms). I'm currently in SF (no wireless visible from my hotel on fisherman's wharf), and the data is free, so I hooked it up. I went to my company's home page, and noticed the graphics looks like they were run through Photoshop with 95% JPEG compression.
Turns out, sprint has a transparent web proxy (the IP address I get via PPP is public, so it's being done transparently) that takes images and severely reduces the quality. It also appears to take web pages that do not gzip compress their HTML and does so.
Now, I imagine some people would be jumping up and down saying "I never authorized you to change the content I requested!", but I am not one of those. Cellular data can be fast, but the latency is horrible by nature, so I can use all the help I get. And since this is not a temporary internet connection, I want things fast, not necessarily true to the original.
Here in Canada, telcos/cablos found a new way to attract customers to broadband-like connection, just slower: 128/64kbps access, for around us$17, modem rental included.. It obviously depends on service availability but at least it's truly faster than dialup!
have you been defaced today?
The ISPs are simply trying to stay alive by trying to sell supposedly faster internet access because the telco's won't let them sell dsl anywhere.
This is actually a pretty cool technology. However, there are better ones than Propel. I work for a company that sells a similar server. It is at http://www.browseblast.com. You can actually use it as a standalone product. In other words, if you have another ISP, you can use BrowseBlast's client. We actually tested the Propel client and got slower results than the one that we went with. If you want, feel free to go to the site. There is a free FIRST MONTH trial, so you can see if you like it. There are a couple of things to note about this kind of technology: 1) Yes.. it usually maintains a connection. It is a proprietary client/server technology. Someone posted that IE got in trouble when they did this. Perhaps, but only in the browser arena. 2) There are some people saying to just increase your browser cache and you'll get the same affect. This might be true, if it is the second time you pull up the site. Read on for explanations as to why that isn't necessarily the truth. 3) Englarging the cache doesn't give you the entire affect. With actual web site retreival being from a server on a high speed network, the multiple gets required are sped up a lot compared to dialup. In comparison, you have to deal with the latency of a single modem user sending back and forth conversation packets to a web server somewhere out on the internet. 4) The link over dialup is compressed with a lossless compression. Thus, text is compressed greatly. 5) Graphics are usually recompressed. I don't know about Propels client, but with the BrowseBlast client, you can specify the quality of the image. If you want speed more than anything, you can lower the quality of the image recompression and the size will be greatly reduced. If you come to a site that you want to increase the quality of the images, you raise the quality in the client and reload the page in the browser. 6) There were some statements about how speed of email would not be affected with it. Currently BrowseBlast doesn't support email, but the word is coming down the pipe that it will be soon. Don't quote me on this one, but.. we'll see. 7) It only recompresses GIF and JPEG images. 8) As to the actual amount of speedup, that all depends. The more you view that is compressable, the more difference you'll notice. 9) This product works the best for DialUp users. It wasn't really designed for people having connections with T1 speeds or higher. 10) People are saying that it's getting in the way of rolling out regular broadband? This is not the case. Broadband is rolling out and taking out anything in its way :) However, there are a LOT of users that are currently limited to dialup and have NO OTHER OPTIONS. This is really a killer product for those people and the people that are limited to connections slower than a T1.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. If you doubt the technology, download it and give it a try. It's pretty cool!
-Gruph
enjoy.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
what you wrote on your site really can only work if the propel server knows what "version" of the amazon page sits on your computer - and your computer has to have a big enough cache that holds all the random pages you visit.
SO
assuming all users on the propel network gives pretty good coverage of the whole net, propel has to literally cache the whole net.
However, since sites like amazon sends "customized" pages to customers, propel has to cache different versions of the amazon page for different customers! That's like caching the internet, only you do it a few thousand times and keep track of which version goes to who.
I know storage is cheap; but damn; that's pretty rough.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Browsing an iPhoto library with 2000+ files strikingly slow, and surprisingly fast considering the math that is going into it.
That's just because iPhoto is retarded. I mean, how hard is it to do that once, and then cache the resulting thumbnail for later?
Dunno about the US or what, but in many countries, including Malaysia, the term "Broadband" usually has to come with the quote-unquote, because services like DSL or ADSL doesn't guarantee that you get a speedy hookup.
Sometimes the ADSL line performs SLOWER than a 56K dialup line !
At least that's what happening to the ADSL service in Malaysia, offered by the telecommunication monopoly, the Telekom Malaysia.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This is just compression of web content.
Most webservers and browsers already support compression as part of the HTTP standard.
In any case, it will only improve WEB PAGE download times, it wont speedup downloads in general (eg, that ISO, MPEG, or ZIP file you want wont come any faster)
In short, this is just a marketing gimmick to fool nontechnical people into thinking they are getting something for their extra money.
Hey! On a Mac, (on G4Ti, 9.2.2, IE 5.1.6, SF 6.0 r79, anyway) well, it occurred to me, this is a Player, I control-clicked on some Flash, a Contextual Menu opened, I chose Settings, and lo and behold, a teeny-weeny window opened (yes, I said teeny-weeny) with so many options you never knew you had, gosh, it was almost too much.
p /settings/global_privacy.html
Buttons -- cute, little ones -- Allow or Deny site access to your Camera and Microphone. An adorable little slider sizes, ahem, how much Òstorage spaceÒ you want to give the site, this time, next time, or even Never. That's not an option I see alot, Never.
But wait! There's more! Choose Advanced to be whisked away to Macromedia's hidden treasure-site, Flash Player Settings Manager! Who knew!
Where you will find the Settings Manager panel, offering you Global, I said Global, Privacy and Storage settings, Website Privacy, and Website Storage settings. http://www.macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/hel
What does it all mean? You are the boss of your own plug-in! And here you thought it was the other way 'round. Why Macromedia would do this, I personally don't know, must be a federal lawÑ-but now my Shockwave Flash plug-in must tell every website I ever visit, for all of time and space, "No you can't keep your crap on my hard disk, fool.Ò And I have told it, in no uncertain terms, ÒDon't you ever, ever ask me again.Ò
I don't know, maybe I'm overreacting here, but this is pretty heady stuff.
I thought I would give a "hypothetical" insiders perspective. Assuming that someone worked at previously mentioned ISP, they might be able to provide some insight. And perhaps the insight would be as such:
/. have no use for Earthlink Plus. People who do filesharing have no use for Earthlink Plus. People who play online games have no use for Earthlink Plus. (I'm sure you can fill in the etc, etc, etc here)
;)
People on
However, people that visit the same old websites every day (i.e., this one, or a news site, or an email site) would notice increased speed on those pages.
I would imagine that this proverbial Earthlink employee would point out that this product is not marketed as "56k x 5!!!!" Instead, it is marketed as it is: a 56k accelorator (sic), using caching and compression to increase the speeds on pages the user would visit frequently.
And that hypothetical employee might also point out that people are eating it up, even when you point out that it will not speed up the overall online experience.
But, keep in mind this is all just hypothetical.
I mean, really, how many hundreds of people does it take to point out that "more compression is bogus"? Has it occurred to anybody that this software might send _diffs_ of web pages, and the performance increase isn't mainly from compression at all? MSN's homepage is nearly 30k, but how much of that really changes on a day-to-day basis? 10k? Bam! You just sped up your connection (sort of) by a factor of ~3. How about e-mails? My Hotmail page is 60k now. If I get 5 new e-mails, I should only have to download a few extra k, not 60 again. Bam! Many times faster. Try to think a little.
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Lets see you guys speed test my new PHP-enabled streaming audio FM radio application running in my house which is connected via ADSL (+200 Kbps upstream). Stress testing here we go...
http://zmaster.dyndns.org/fm_radio/
Cheers!
Paul Zimmerman
http://zimmermantech.com/email.htm
Listen to Live FM Radio
Do you hear that sound? It's the sound of my beleagured wallet, crying for mercy. Seriously, it's hard to maintain a broadband connection when you have other things--like food and shelter-- to take care of first.
So, why again should I pay for $30/m for bad when I can pay $20 for good?
Less is more !
Windows has a built in ad blocker. Just goto c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (must open it with notepad or text viewer) and voila -- add 127.0.01 or whatever to your *favorite* ad server, restart your browser, and never see em again.
... you can get broadband, and that's about 75x faster than 56k. Hmm. Who needs customer support then? Besides, all they ever ask you anyway is if you plugged in your computer.
When loading web pages, one big delay is caused by the overhead of establishing a TCP/IP connection. If there are a dozen elements (GIFs, etc) on a page, you could require a dozen TCP/IP connections (yes, HTTP 1.1 addresses this problem a bit...).
Propel's technology uses a single TCP/IP connection that's held open for your entire connection. You connect to their special server that contains a massive cache, and sends the data to you compressed and over this single stable connection.
It also re-compresses all images, and makes sure that you aren't trying do display images bigger than what the browser's scaling it to. (You wouldn't believe how many web sites have 1 MB images displayed at postage-stamp thumbnails. Apparently stupid web designers on their Macs think that setting the width= and height= tags is equivalent to actually scaalng the images.) GIFS, especially banner ads, are converted to black and white.
No, it won't speed up MP3 downloads, but it really does make regualr web browsing on a 53K dial-up quite tolerable. I use "Propel" when I'm on the road.
Best Buy can have you arrested
First, it isn't snake oil. It really does improve the actual time to download web pages substantially. Many "real world" web pages download 3, 4, or 5 times faster than before.
How fast is it?
The eBay home page loads more than 5 times faster (from 7.75 seconds to 1.5 seconds). The CNet home page loads almost 9 times faster when Propel is used (from 36.4 seconds to 4.3 seconds). On average, that is for a wide range of web pages, you can expect that the pages will load from 2 to 5 times faster than they did before you installed Propel. You should try it and see for yourself.
Or if you are sure this can't be done, then I invite you to take advantage of the following opportunity: You bet me any amount of money up to $1M dollars. I'll show you a 5X improvement in actual web page download speed on a selection of popular web pages from top 100 websites (not some contrived test pages, but real web pages). If you can prove it is some kind of hoax, I pay you. If I get 5X or more speed improvement compared to dialup without Propel, you pay me the amount you wagered. We'll use the exact same PC for the tests with the caches in exactly the same state connected to the same ISP at the same baud rate. Modem compression on or off, your choice. No tricks. Minimum bet is $1,000. If you are confident this is a trick, this is a quick way to make a lot of money really fast. We'll invite the press to audit it. Any takers?
Or you can read the review on CNet. They tested it and wrote in their review:
You have to remember that that review was written a long time ago. We've almost doubled our speed since that CNet review was written. That's why our claim of 2 to 5x on the latest version of Propel is consistent with the review.
How it really works
How do we do this magic? Through at least 20 techniques including persistent connections, up and down header compresssion, caching that is combined with diffing of HTML and graphics, and the compression (either lossless and lossy depending on the filetype and user settings) of filetypes that most people "think" cannot possibly be compressed any further. For example, think that Flash cannot be compressed because it already is? Think again.
Web pages consist of HTML and graphics primarily. We compress all the various datatypes and decompress on your local machine. Comments that "you can't compress graphics because they are already compressed" are from people who are misinformed. For example, Jpeg2K provides much higher compression for equivalent quality level than jpg does. And LZW is hardly the best compression scheme for GIF graphics. That technology was invented a long time ago and there are much better lossless compression algorithms for such files. For example, PNG is better than GIF but (surprise) there are propriety file formats that are superior to PNG.
If you are willing to tolerate quality degradation, you can compress even more. Propel has a slider so you can set your tolerance threshold for graphics (text and HTML are always lossless).
For HTML compression, we use our patent-pending lossless technique that makes full use of the cache in your browser by allowing us to reference text fragments o
maintaining a TCP connection is, indeed, expensive, that is if it is happening directly between the end-user and the web server. However, Propel's model sets up a proxy on EarthLink's end which interfaces with the endless amount of proxies that sit on user's computers, and TCP connections are maintained inbetween proxies. Yes it is expensive, hence the added cost. But the benefits are real. Not having to do SYN/ACK on each HTTP request is a HUGE saving.
Also, not all web servers have HTTP pipelining enabled. There are many reasons why web server administrators of heavily trafficked sites would elect to NOT enable pipeling, the main one being added CPU load (again i am talking about HEAVILY trafficked sites) and the fact that pipelining will hog a single HTTP listener for an increased amount of time, thereby reducing the pooling of resources across multiple simultaneous users.
DNS looks are NOT well-cached *at all*. i know for a fact that TTLs are largely ignored by slave and client DNS servers which implement their OWN caching settings across the board.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Jpeg's can be compressed further (much) because they of the lossless compression step. Initial lossy compression step makes them even more compressible, and actually the whole point of two step compression is this.
As for speed, yes MNP5 was a little choppy and didn't make any difference for zmodem on a compressed file. V42 doesn't hurt performance much though.
CEASE AND DESIST, BY ORDER OF THE HUMAN RACE
Chuck your software patent in the bin!
Then you could benefit the human race instead of owning a monopoly in order to kill off any competition and to sue unsuspecting users/developers for some "pocket money".
At this point, I must refer you and anyone else reading this to some more detailed information:
The EuroLinux File on Software Patents
Think about it. If you dialup with a windoze machine to a windoze machine, you get "software compression" (a tad bit better than what's built into the modem).
If your provider has a proxy supporting HTTP/1.1 and you're using a 1.1 browser like Lynx, Phoenix, or IE, your connection to the provider is already persistent. The browser will typically open 2-4 TCPs to the proxy and keep them alive at all times. Even 1.0 browsers can keep-alive connections, though they lack a few encodings to do this for server-generated (content-length unknown) content.
Too bad the servers at the provider are so overloaded that using the proxy actually lowers performance...
Web designers can do a lot more on the performance than this kind of software. For example, putting a 1-week expiration time on button/icon images will instruct the browser to not even check for a newer version during that week. (mod_expire is a must...)
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
> a text file with 1,048,576 bytes of rather random ASCII data [...]
> represents 8,388,608 bits
Nay, 1,048,576 bytes of ASCII data never represents more than 7,340,032 bits.
The existence of companies like Propel.com implies that performance can still be squeezed from plain old 56K connections. So how can we get implement similar functionality for free?
From Propel's website (the link in your post above):
* Compression. Propel delivers text and graphics more efficiently, using a patent-pending compression technology that allows for intelligent encoding of Web pages and page elements sent to your browser.
It looks like Propel has implemented something similar to Akamaitech - a network of geographically dispersed network caches available to subscribers. This is impossible to replicate for free. (Right ?)
* Caching. Propel intelligently retains and re-uses Web pages and page elements that have previously been sent to your PC. That's why the longer Propel Accelerator is in use on your PC, the faster your Web pages will load.
Now how would this work? Maybe I could set my browser to cache *everything* (even disobeying a page's cache directive). And, in the background, the browser could figure out if the remote page had been updated (say, with HTTP HEAD) and if so, display a transition effect to the updated page.
* Persistent Connections. Propel uses proprietary techniques to carefully manage and optimize the communication between your modem and our servers using a persistent connection.
Hmm. Sounds like HTTP pipelining could help here. Also, how about implementing a DNS cache and a proxy server on the local machine (the one running the browser) -- would that help?
Us Free Software users have had effective Point to Point Protocol (PPP) compression for years!
Yea that image quality reduction is a royal pain in the ass.
:P)
We have one customer we made a website for who uses AOL, his website contains a lot of pictures that ALL look totally shit once the AOL proxy has compressed them. Does anyone know any way of avoiding it? (other than not using aol
It was lucky for us that our customer (non-techie) was able to come into our office and see that we actually were using high resolution images and it was just his ISP making the site look shit. It isn't so lucky that a perfectly good website will now look shitty to everyone on AOL because of their own setup, and most of them will assume its the fault of the site/designers.
You gotta hand it to the marketing departments on this one... they are selling this as "An alternitive to broadband" to those who don't want to pay that much, or who are in an area where they cannot get broadband.
I've had at least 3 people ask me if this was a good idea. I said NO in eveyr case, becuase they want to charge you a monthly fee to run a compression algorithm, which I don't think is fair. The fee is usually like $5-$7. If it was like $.50 a month, I'd say GO GO GO! But $5-$7 is cyber-highway robbery.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Modems have been doing compression for years. As others have pointed out, no compression technique is going to help you very much on precompressed files (Images, video, etc. All of the "big stuff" that people buy broadband to receive.) For text it will be a benefit, but not one already offered by modems. (As someone pointed out though, many modems have a limit at the serial port of 115k, so compression on the PC side of this would be of use. Note that the PPP standard has support for some sort of compression, most ISPs don't use it. If you have a machine on the "outside world" with a broadband connection, SSH tunneling to a remote HTTP proxy, with SSH compression turned on will give you a speed boost.)
Caching - Many ISPs already do this, although few ISPs do. It's built into almost all browsers, and if you want "smarter" caching, install Squid.
Persistent connections have been part of HTTP 1.1 for ages.
In short: Nothing you can't already do now for free, but the ISPs are making it easier.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
To block flash and many other banners, install bannerfilter on a Squid proxy. (In the future, it may install into Netscape or Mozilla.) http://www.phroggy.com/bannerfilter It speeds up browsing on our LAN at work. While the line is quick, the clients are old, slow computers.
Expand's product requires one unit at either end of the link. Propel's probably does too, and it looks like they're selling subscriptions to use their "other end." So essentially, your ISP just becomes a way to tunnel back to Propel, and Propel's going to have to maintain large pipes to connect to wherever it is you're connecting.
I give 'em 12 months before appearing on F*cked Company.
This reminds me of the BBS days. A small upstart modem manufacturing company at the time was offering "9600 bps" modems to unsuspecting computer users. In reality what they were was a 2400 bps modem using MNP-5 or V.42bis(? I think that's right). So in reality, their throughput was WAY lower than 9600 bps.
I can't even remember the name of the company (maybe someone else does) which this information may help to explain. They probably didn't survive this little bit of dis-information.
Others have waxed eloquent here on what these tactics can do for performance. In general, no one should expect (or believe!) that WWW surfing will get a whole lot faster for these users of enhanced dial-up.
In fact, the Propel tech is, for the most part, already available in modern browsers. The problem is that ISPs are not in control of their users' end-points (i.e. what browser they are using). Consequently, they mandate the Propel tech as a way to ensure all their users are at a sufficient level of browing capability.
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
Where I live you can get a 256k/128k cable modem for about $40/month if you have cable already, and my district is horrendously expensive. The gains from this would have to be incredible to make it worthwhile for users. It's possible this could be worthwhile in areas where broadband is more expensive or less available, assuming you can access an ISP which has implemented the technology, but I just don't think the demand is there for something like this.
If you don't mind the latency, the USPS has pretty decent bandwidth.
as /. readers, we like to think that the public is as l33t as us. They're not. (Sorry.) If some dong comes out and says "5 times faster than dialup" most of the lusers will think it's faster with everything, and they'll all go for it since it's "cheaper" and "more easier" and because "they don't have to have the neighbor kid hook it up and look like an idiot."
I mean, AOL is the most popular ISP, and people must be clicking those banner ads that look like dialog boxes. This shows the intelligence of the majority of 'net users. They won't be able to see through this.
>> It is a 64Kbps channel
>
> Yes it is.
>
>> 8kb are used for signaling
>
> Absolutely not true.
No, he's right.
Check here for an explanation.
Check out: http://www.pacwest.com/dialbroadband/index.cfm The product name is about as bad as marketing can get. This system works with ANY browser that supports http 1.1 gzip compression. Propel most likely is a win32 only app. DialBrodband is not sold directly to endusers from Pacwest. Pacwest is a modem wholesaler.. right now it is only avalible in California.
Big whoop. I can do this with CVS and gzip.
Hi,
About this old west shoot out do you think you are the fastest?
Do you want to place any of your investors money on a dial up shoot out?
Propel markets this as a Dial-up acceleration program, but the program is just a caching, web accelerator. Seems to me, that their proprietary web data compression algorithms, and persistent tcp/ip connections, could just as easily be applied to a broadband connection. If so.. it'd be kinna nice to set up on a web gateway, even at a home w/ only a few computers. I'm guessin it's a Windows only software, so what does that leave you? Wine? Windows NT/2k Server?
interesting...
shante_rs IZAT yahoo.com
We can only claim what we know, not what we don't know. We know we're the fastest of all the dialup accelerator products we know about based on their latest release that is available. So yes, our investors would be pleased to accept your donation in an attempt to disprove that statement.
If you are using Windows try Proxomitron. It is a HTML filtering proxy server that removes/limits banners/popups/animated gifs/Flash etc. The great thing is that it stops the crud before downloading it.
I am trying to find a Linux app that does the
same job but no luck yet - closest is Webwasher.
(I believe that Proximitron may work under Wine.)
Any suggestions?
Don't make your problems my problems!
I was just at your website and I noticed that you have a quote from Marc Andreesen on your front page. I was pretty impressed until I noticed that he is one of your investors.
Your use of an investors quote (without clearly mentioning that he is an investor) on your front page is absolutely misleading and this, if nothing else, tells me that you guys are a SCAM out to make a quick buck.
Whatever credibility you gained by your "million dollar challenge" just got flushed down the toilet by this misleading PR. You lost (at least) one customer.
VMS Beer: Requires minimal user interaction, except for popping the top
and sipping. However cans have been known on occasion to explode, or
contain extremely un-beer-like contents.
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