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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?"
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.
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...
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.
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.
I think you're probably correct. You can always enable HTML compression at the web server and web clients that "understand" it will see better performance. We started using it where I work for mobile devices connected to our intranet, but we were disappointed by the results -- mostly because the images being downloaded (the bulk of the data) were already compressed and the HTML compression had a negligible impact on performance. I would anticipate similar issues if the technology Earthlink is using is the same. Redhat.com and Yahoo.com will download pretty fast. Viewing the latest photos on your family website will still be an exercise in patience.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Right but modems have had transparent compression for a long time. 56k is 56k+plus compression.
I don't see anything new and given the fact that telcos internally encode analog lines at 64k I don't see much more improvement there either given that an 8k loss in the analog to digital conversion and back again is extrordinarily small when you think about it.
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.
Yesterday I came across the same offer on Coastal Web Online's home page while looking at colocation deals. Here is a direct link to their product page: www.cwo.com/3xs-index.html.
They are claiming 3x the performance -- "if your modem gets 52k, 3XS will increase it up to 156k." Hrm... Costs regular dialup account price plus $8/month. So almost $30/month.
I think it is pretty dumb as regular HTML isn't all that bad. I only get highly annoyed when I'm downloading software or viewing largish binary data like images. Now if only the ISP would turn on compression on their end everything would be sweet (*).
* Yeah, I had broadband, yeah, I don't now. I moved to a rural area that has both cable and DSL but the contract lengths or costs are just too stupid to consider while living in a short term apartment.
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.
What if only half the web paged is changed - can your proxy correctly cache this file? Think diffs and think how that might apply to this situation.
And when they mean persistent connection, it's persistent between you and your ISP's server, not the remote website - this doesn't violate anything.
If I recall correctly, some languages actually do this. For example, in Hebrew the name Yahweh is written
... if you are taking notes, for example, you can probably increase your writing speed 20-50% by eliminating vowels. It's a lossy compression scheme, but our brain does a decent job of nearest-neighbor reconstruction, based on context. The small words get tricky though...
Yhwh
Similarly, in Arabic the vowel sounds, which are indicated by marks above/below the letters (which are consonants), are used for the benefit of non-native speakers. Native speakers know how to fill in the vowels.
It seems this compression would work quite well for native English speakers
t (it, at, eat, out, to)
"because they can" -- basicly.
ISDN is expensive entirely because PUCs allowed it to be tariffed higher. At the time, there really was a substantial cost to providing ISDN as most of the switching systems were analog. This goes hand-in-hand with that stupid f***ing $0.25 Bellsouth charged per month for "touch tone service" for over 20 YEARS -- they stoped a few years ago. The PUCs allowed the charge to recover some of the costs of upgrading switching equipment to include tone decoders. (I have, of course, always used a Radio Shack pulse phone... it's very hard on a "modern" switch to deal with pulse dialing these days. And sometimes, it simply gets it wrong.)
If telcos had any sense, they'd offer packet switched voice and data services via ISDN. One can oversell the shit out of packet switched networks (eg. Frame Relay.)
Oh, and ISDN isn't expensive everywhere... TN seems to have been awake when Bell walked in with their tariff proposal. I do beleive TN has the cheapest ISDN offering on the planet.
doesn't disabling Install-On-Demand (in tools->Internet Options->Advanced) disable those nags?