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

Myth

[KingDaveRa]

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.

Re:Myth

[TopShelf]

Seriously! By simply blocking them, they'd accelerate your web experience even further!

Speaking of such, does anyone know of a good was to screen out Flash animations?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

From Propels website

[Myrv]

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.

they'll pass your test easily!

[morcheeba]

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!!

It's mostly snakeoil, but not completely

[Sloppy]

There does seem to be one clever thing they are doing. From their web page:

..The next time you visit the Amazon home page (which may have changed since the last visit), the following events occur:

• Your request for the Web page is automatically routed by the Propel Client to the Propel Network.
• The Propel Network retrieves the requested Web page from the Amazon Web site. Having identified the page elements that had previously been retrieved in a prior visit, the Propel Network only compresses and transmits those components that changed.
• Data already stored on your PC - plus any new decoded page elements - are assembled locally by the Propel Client and delivered to the Web browser.

Diffs! That's actually a good idea and it really would work.