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56k Times Five: Myth Or Moneymaker?

Posted by timothy on from the sounds-like-a-fair-bargain-to-me dept.

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?"

3 of 492 comments (clear)

  1. Myth by KingDaveRa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Cmprsss txt b rmvng ll vwls by hoggoth · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 /dev/random (may take some time)
  3. From Propels website by Myrv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.