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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.
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.
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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?
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!
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