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?"

Comments

Read the Article

[Obiwan Kenobi]

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.

Won't work...

[ZorinLynx]

A normal telephone call, at least in the united states, is carried on a 64Kbps channel. IE, the sound is sampled, converted into a 64Kbps bit stream that is sent through the network to the other end, where it is converted back into an analog stream.

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.

possibly...

[ferrocene]

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.

Speed vs. Time

[ChrisKnight]

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

Re:Myth

[TopShelf]

They're using Propel's web accelerator. From Propel's website:

What will be accelerated
All text - HTML, markup, and javascript
Most graphics & photos - including jpeg and gif images and most Flash images and animation
Most banner ads
All browser-based emails
All emails that contain images - even when read in a dedicated email program

What will *not* be accelerated
Streaming media, and audio and video files
Secure pages, such as those used for online banking and credit card forms
MP3 files and executable programs

How does it work?

[stratjakt]

From www.propel.com:

Propel Accelerator is designed to provide maximum acceleration for the Web sites you visit regularly.

So, the more you surf, the faster your favorite pages will load!

Specifically, Propel Accelerator speeds up the delivery of Web pages three ways:

Compression. Propel Accelerator delivers text and graphics more efficiently, using a proprietary compression technology that significantly reduces the size of Web pages and page elements sent to your browser.

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.

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.
Looking for more technical detail on how Propel Accelerator works? Please refer to our Technical Overview. It explains the various components and how they interact with one another.

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 /. icons would stay cached but the text wouldnt).

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?

Re:time to compress

[Jennifer E. Elaan]

When a web browser connects to a page, it (can) send a line called "Accept-Encoding" that describes what compressions it can understand. For instance, Konqueror sends "Accept-Encoding: x-gzip, gzip, identity".

Presumably, identity is standard uncompressed text. The others indicate its willingness to accept gzipped files from the webserver.

Since HTML is text, you have a GUARANTEE of 1/8th space savings. Since HTML tends to use a lot of similar codes, the space savings are, in all likelihood, far greater. Since on dialup, the latency of compression is trivial in comparison to the limitations of bandwidth, this may help substantially.

Web-server compression makes sense to me.

Then again, there are PPP extensions for compression now too. These would have a similar benefit.

Combined with both an off-site connection proxy and an on-site data proxy (this is what their webpage suggests they base their technology on), you get the enhancement they claim, more or less (not for compressed files or raw data transfer though).

Re:Myth

[reidbold]

You could try uninstalling the flash player.

5x dialup speeds is based on 28.8kbps speeds

[t-maxx cowboy]

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.