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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?"
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.
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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.
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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
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?
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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!
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!!
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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.
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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.
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
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