I think I remember reading something about a company playing with realtime data compression to give faster speeds through dialup connections regardless of your ISP. My instant reactions were:
* Nonsense. ISPs would have to support it, or how would the signals be compressed/decompressed at their end? Given that most ISPs won't even support V92, what are the odds?
* Your existing analogue connection has a maximum bandwidth. Anything that claims to push beyond that is probably rubbish. Switch the medium so it's carrying digital data and bandwidth will improve, but you can't get over that basic limitation as it stands.
* Demo of it working? Yup a flash animation. I saw an animation years ago of superman saving the world but it doesn't necessarily mean he did.. ;)
The only thing that makes me wonder are the testimonials by well respected internet publications. I'd be interested to find out how it actually does work, but the site is extremely vague on that. BY all means give it a go, but I think that for the moment I'll invoke the 'if it sounds too good..' rule :)
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Ah, found it - I see what they're claiming now.
The principle is that your requested websites don't come directly from your ISP, but are routed through to their servers which then compress the content ready for your client to decompress it.
Hmm.
In theory that would work to a degree, but you still have the time for the site to be contacted (with the middleman creating slightly more delay, I'd imagine) and the time it takes to compress the data by a reasonable amount. Generally, the faster the compression the 'lossier' the result, which brings us to the crux:
This service would only appear to compress easily choppable content - plain text and images will arrive slightly faster, but at a reduced quality (which they allow you to set targets for). Anything more than that (Program downloads, streaming media, MP3s, MPEG video, etc) won't really be altered at all. Given that this is what really hammers your bandwidth, I fail to see the point. I'd rather wait a few seconds longer and view the page as it was intended to look... (web designer mode off now ;)
So, overall your connection (by which I mean the physical linkup at a given speed, NOT the average transfer speed of the data you choose to cram through it in a session) isn't actually made any faster whatsoever - it just squashes up a minimal part of the content so it arrives faster but messier. I'd say that this is taking an exceptional liberty and, if I'm reading it correctly, the service really shouldn't be advertised in those terms.
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I think you are much more technically knowledgeable than I Kuang, and I am not disagreeing with your analysis of what they may be doing, but they cannot provide data in a lossy manner as they would not know which bits to keep and which to discard. Which would result in non-functioning programs/web pages etc. You are spot on about certain files types already being compressed, so if they are claiming to be able to significantly compress data that would be open to question.
I would suspect that it is possible that they are providing data over multiple threads, similar to some of those download helpers or file sharing clients. That is to say that the whole of a download gets downloaded (effectively cached) to their server (at lightening speed), from where your connection retrieves it in a multi threaded manner.
I used to spend more time monitoring my connection, and I noticed that with dial up the data comes down the pipe in fits and starts (bursts), probably due to contention on the modems at the ISP end or line quality. Since having broadband I have seen a much smoother pattern - when you are downloading from a good connection, data will stream in without peaks and troughs, making full (or, at least, constant) use of the available bandwidth. So not only is the bandwidth of regular broadband up to 10x better, but the usage of the bandwidth is better too.
Unless broadband is not available in their area I cannot imagine why any regular internet user would not have broadband these days. The service is cheap, always on and (mostly) reliable. Even the 128mb services offered by NTL and others is streets ahead of dial up.
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Ah sorry, yeah - reading back, I really didn\'t say that as clearly as I could have done :)
They do state that they have different realtime compression algorithms for different data types, but this would mean that only the ones related to images (or data where distortion isn\'t important) would be lossy. This in itself isn\'t a big deal as most image formats work their own compression in this way anyway - it\'s probably just a fast on-the-fly way of reworking the image, which would probably be perfectly fine following the fast caching process you mention. To be fair, they do state that they allow you to set the quality of image you\'d be happy with, so there must be some degradation taking place.
I imagine the algorithm used to compress data identified as needing accuracy (webpages, plaintext, etc) would just be an extension of well known tokenising techniques but done in realtime at high speed, which would maintain the integrity. There does come a point in any compression technique though where the amount of saved space and the time taken to compress/decompress the data don\'t offer any significant advantages over the original data itself - for example: in a stream of a million completely random patternless characters you couldn\'t pick blocks of repeating characters to replace with tokens. The most you could do is replace the entire stream with a token, but then you\'d have exactly what you had before, with the added overhead of tokens and the extras needed to store the new resulting file. Overall you\'d be spending extra time decompressing and be wasting space compared to just leaving the file as it is. If this is the case, it\'d suggest they have some nifty techniques for working out if a file is likely to benefit from compression.
I definitely agree with the advantages of multithreaded-type connections being one of the greatest benefits of broadband. Dialups are getting better, but they still work in fits and starts for the most part. I tend to use DownLoadMage to improve my file downloads, as it handles multiple connections really well. You\'re still limited by the phone system itself, but at least you\'re using all of the nooks and crannies to cram extra stuff into, with the advantage that it\'ll monitor different mirrors of a file to determine which is giving the best performance, and switches automatically if it sees a benefit.
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Kuang and Smokie,
Thanks for your input and comments. I've been looking at this because my connection is slow (we are a long way from the exchange) and I can't afford broadband yet. Even with broadband BT say that we would be down on speed since we are right on the limit regarding distance from the exchange.
I've been using the Proxomitron programme which is a free download and this does seem to quicken things up a bit by filtering out some of the stuff that is normally downloaded with a webpage. Works through a proxy and some setting changes are required in the browser. I used this with IE but now with Mozilla Firebird (thank you BR's for flagging up Molliza) which I think is nicer to use with good functionality. I'm going have to think about this onspeed now. £24 for minimum one year's subscription so may give it a go but it might interfer with the Proxomitron programme.
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