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FastTCP Commercialized Into An FTP Appliance

Posted by Zonk on from the speedy-delivery dept.

prostoalex writes "FastTCP technology, developed by researchers at CalTech, is being commercialized. A company called FastSoft has introduced a hardware appliance that delivers 15x-20x faster FTP transmissions than those delivered via regular TCP. Says eWeek: 'The algorithm implemented in the Aria appliance senses congestion by continuously measuring the round-trip time for the TCP acknowledgment and then monitoring how that measurement changes from moment to moment.'"

5 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. FastTCP is just a fancy name for TCP Vegas? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    FastTCP sounds like a fancy name for TCP Vegas (which has been around for quite some time). Window scaling and Vegas should buy you pretty much everything that FastTCP seems to be offering... Sounds like marketspeak to me.

    1. Re:FastTCP is just a fancy name for TCP Vegas? by jollyreaper · · Score: 5, Funny

      FastTCP sounds like a fancy name for TCP Vegas (which has been around for quite some time). Window scaling and Vegas should buy you pretty much everything that FastTCP seems to be offering... Sounds like marketspeak to me. You wouldn't want to use TCP Vegas, the packets are unroutable. What happens in TCP Vegas stays in TCP Vegas.
      --
      Kwisatz Haderach
      Sell the spice to CHOAM
      This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
  2. Re:hmm by stud9920 · · Score: 5, Informative

    No. TCP is end to end, the nodes in between could not care less (except for dubious filtering purposes) what layer 4 protocol is piggybacking upon IP proper.

  3. Re:No Way by maharg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The problem is that "regular" TCP mis-interprets long Round-Trip-Time (aka latency) as link congestion and backs off the rate at which it is sending packets.

    The bandwidth between point A and B may be rated at a high throughput, but TCP protocols such as FTP will never achieve that speed if the RTT is long. Increasing the bandwidth won't help !! So a slowdown of 20-30x is not uncommon on WAN links with high latency e.g. transcontinental, via satellite.

    I've looked at technologies like Digital Fountain (and it's Java implementation, FileCatalyst) which use UDP and some clever mathematics to overcome latency, however it's not clear from TFA what FastTCP is doing underneath..

    --

    $ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
    @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
  4. XMODEM by BinBoy · · Score: 5, Funny

    This could be the XMODEM killer.