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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?"
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.
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?
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.