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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.
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.
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.
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.
EarthLink Plus uses a proprietary "Web Accelerator" from Propel Software which reduces the size of Web pages and elements sent to users' browsers.
Sounds cool, but in reality it's just Lynx for OSX.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
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.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
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
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
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.
I hope that EarthLink qualifies what they mean by 5x faster. They're probably talking about "user experience" speeds. Because, if you think about it, when we do backups, we use 2:1 compression as the "ideal," and everyone that's ever loaded Travan or DLT or DDS drives knows that when it says 200GB, it means 200GB compressed at 2:1. Short of some sort of very high-powered (in terms of CPU cycles) compression, 5:1 is almost impossible to achieve--certainly with desktop hardware, and probably not at all.
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
Perhaps they are using the Lzip compression algorithm to speed things up.
http://lzip.sourceforge.net/
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They have invented a new text compression method that is analogous to the pscho-acoustic models used to remove the sound the human ear doesn't notice anyway.
Thy smply rmv ll f th vwls n th txt. Ths wy thy cn gt a hghr cmprssn rt.
Thnk f t ths wy: Thy cn cmprss t 11. The thr gys cn nly cmprss t 10. S, 11 s bttr thn 10.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Surely it could be both.
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.
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
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?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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).
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
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.
This is not exactly new tech here. Many wireless providers, such as Voicestream/T-Mobile/whatever they are called this week, use this accelerating proxy for PDAs and laptops. They will actually attempt to re-compress and re-size many of the images from the websites. They also strip out "redundant" information from the HTML.
For the image recompression, they can also convert the image to B&W (user setting) for additional compression. Based on this, I would say the 7x faster web page download is possible, but at a significant quality loss.
Looks like Earthlink is just using an existing wireless product for dial-up.
On a side note, most of the accelerating proxies I've gone through have usually managed to mangle our XML SOAP stream to the point where we actually have to use a different port to avoid it.
Wow, all we need to do is combine this technology with this technology and we'll have our information before we even load the browser.
Propel Fitness Water = "Turbocharged" Water
We're doomed.
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.
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!!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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.
Now if only the ISP would turn on compression on their end everything would be sweet (*).
.jpgs are also pre-compressed (part of the format).
.zip. So basically, these things are rip-offs unless you sit around downloading huge uncompressed files all day long.
Compression "enhancements" like this won't do you any good on your downloaded software or most images. Your downloaded programs are already compressed. Something like this can't crunch it much further, if at all. Pics like
Compression works by eliminating repetitive data in a way that can be reveresed. You can only do it once. That's why you don't get a smaller file if you try to zip a
What if they have a better compression algorithm that makes the image smaller while retaining quality? JPEG is widespread and standardized but it is not "king" in terms of modern image compression performance. They probably have a transcoder which translates between JPEG and whatever their proprietary format is, with as little degradation as possible. Even a 5-10% savings would make a difference.
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.
I think what they probably mean by this is a persistent connection is maintained between the client and the transparent proxy, *not* between the proxy and the external server. Notice they said "optimize the communication between your modem and our network of servers." This is actually a really good idea since it avoids the overhead of building up and tearing down a TCP connection to the proxy for each web request. The external web server has no idea this is going on; it's something happening between the Propel office and the home user.
Bright sites, unfortunately, show very little improvements.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The standard is long since complete - ISO standard since December 2000. QuickTime for MacOS X has a good implementation of it. And yes, it has both lossless and lossy modes. And yes, the core coding scheme is license and and royalty free.
http://www.jpeg.org/JPEG2000.html
I'm really looking forward to JPEG2000 for digital cameras, since instead of having to cache thumbnails, applications like iPhoto can just decode the wavelet subbands appropraite for the current resolution. Much faster than having to decode the whole JPEG and then cache a thumbnail. Browsing an iPhoto library with 2000+ files strikingly slow, and surprisingly fast considering the math that is going into it.
Still, PNG will probably be better for synthetic graphics like screen shots, where JPEG2000 will be better for natural images.
My video compression blog
How do we end up with these acronyms? Don't people do any research before they try to start using acronyms already in use. [I mean, hell, anyone else remember all of the confusion of trying to explain the concept of ATM networks, without having to explain every other sentance that it has nothing to do with getting money].
As for DVDA, these folks have obviously never seen Orgazmo [I mean, try reading the above message with the other meaning of the acronym]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
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.
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Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
The 56k limit comes from the fact that the phone company's A/D converter is 8 bits wide with an 8kHz sampling period. The phone company also has the option of using your least significant bit for in-band traffic management (also called bit-robbing). This leaves you with 7 bits at 8kHz = 56k.
The modem is not the problem. It's the phone company and their standards.
Besides, modems already do this in analog mode (33.6k). The modem shifts the phase an frequency of the carrier signal to cram 30k of data into a 4kHz bandwidth. There's only so far that you can go.
ADSL modems are a different beast entirely and do not use the POTS (plain old telephone service) circuitry. They have a splitter that sends POTS traffic to the POTS circuit and the ADSL signals to an ADSL modem. They use the same wire, but they are separate signals to the phone company.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Unfortunately, all of this "dark fiber" that is so frequently spoken of is *not* FTHoP (Fiber To Home or Premises), but over-ordered and unlit fiber between MANs (Metropolitan Area Networks). A backbone provider worth their salt will always over-order fiber strands due to fiber-breaks, additional fiber pathway protection and redundancy-on-top-of-redundancy. SONET BLSR (Bi-Directional Line-Switch Ring) takes x2 of the needed fiber strands because you must have an alternate fiber path to provide circuit/ring redundancy to cover fiber breaks/cuts, where as UPSR (Unidirectional Path-Switched Rings) only needs 1 strand per fiber ring because fiber breaks/cuts or failures will cause the equipment to switch-out and "wrap" the ring to try to keep some sort of integrity on the ring and to try to minimize the number of nodes switched-out of the ring.
FTHoP won't be a reality in most neighborhoods for some time to come because of the exorberantly-high prices - unless the city has been forward-thinking enough to include fiber networks pre-built into the city's infrastructure. "Dark Fiber" is a misonmner and does not include FTHoP facilities.
Sorry to burst the bubble - but demz da facts.
ScottKin
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