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56k Times Five: Myth Or Moneymaker?

Posted by timothy on from the sounds-like-a-fair-bargain-to-me dept.

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?"

4 of 492 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Myth by TopShelf · · Score: 4, Informative
    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

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  2. How does it work? by stratjakt · · Score: 4, Informative
    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?
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  3. Re:time to compress by Jennifer+E.+Elaan · · Score: 4, Informative
    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).

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  4. Re:Myth by reidbold · · Score: 4, Informative

    You could try uninstalling the flash player.

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    -Reid