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?"

Myth

[KingDaveRa]

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.

Why is this on Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is obvious crap like this on Slashdot, while much more interesting and pertinent news is totally overlooked? (i.e., the DNS DOS on Al Jazeera)

How many times do we need to hear about unsubstatiated scientific and technological claims?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Myth or Moneymaker?

[washirv]

Surely it could be both.

Re:Myth

[TopShelf]

Seriously! By simply blocking them, they'd accelerate your web experience even further!

Speaking of such, does anyone know of a good was to screen out Flash animations?

From Propels website

[Myrv]

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 new here, move along...

[TheGrimace]

This is not exactly new tech here. Many wireless providers, such as Voicestream/T-Mobile/whatever they are called this week, use this accelerating proxy for PDAs and laptops. They will actually attempt to re-compress and re-size many of the images from the websites. They also strip out "redundant" information from the HTML.

For the image recompression, they can also convert the image to B&W (user setting) for additional compression. Based on this, I would say the 7x faster web page download is possible, but at a significant quality loss.

Looks like Earthlink is just using an existing wireless product for dial-up.

On a side note, most of the accelerating proxies I've gone through have usually managed to mangle our XML SOAP stream to the point where we actually have to use a different port to avoid it.

Re:By the time this is availible...

[Blaine Hilton]

This is definatly a big thing for me. Before DSL or cable was avaiable in my area I had two phone lines and by the time you pay for a POTS line and an ISP account you are only a few bucks more for a DSL connection. Although now I can barly wait around on a dialup connection...

they'll pass your test easily!

[morcheeba]

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 [freesoft.org], and HTML compression is already built into modern browsers [webreference.com]. 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!!

Not that outrageous

[pclminion]

This won't work with already compressed images unless it reduces the quality or resolution.

What if they have a better compression algorithm that makes the image smaller while retaining quality? JPEG is widespread and standardized but it is not "king" in terms of modern image compression performance. They probably have a transcoder which translates between JPEG and whatever their proprietary format is, with as little degradation as possible. Even a 5-10% savings would make a difference.

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.

I think what they probably mean by this is a persistent connection is maintained between the client and the transparent proxy, *not* between the proxy and the external server. Notice they said "optimize the communication between your modem and our network of servers." This is actually a really good idea since it avoids the overhead of building up and tearing down a TCP connection to the proxy for each web request. The external web server has no idea this is going on; it's something happening between the Propel office and the home user.

It's mostly snakeoil, but not completely

[Sloppy]

There does seem to be one clever thing they are doing. From their web page:

..The next time you visit the Amazon home page (which may have changed since the last visit), the following events occur:

• Your request for the Web page is automatically routed by the Propel Client to the Propel Network.
• The Propel Network retrieves the requested Web page from the Amazon Web site. Having identified the page elements that had previously been retrieved in a prior visit, the Propel Network only compresses and transmits those components that changed.
• Data already stored on your PC - plus any new decoded page elements - are assembled locally by the Propel Client and delivered to the Web browser.

Diffs! That's actually a good idea and it really would work.

[OT] DVDA?

[oneiros27]

How do we end up with these acronyms? Don't people do any research before they try to start using acronyms already in use. [I mean, hell, anyone else remember all of the confusion of trying to explain the concept of ATM networks, without having to explain every other sentance that it has nothing to do with getting money].

As for DVDA, these folks have obviously never seen Orgazmo [imdb.com] [I mean, try reading the above message with the other meaning of the acronym]