I’ve been seeing a lot of commercials from the likes of Earthlink and NetZero that claim to have “up to 5 times the speed” of their dial up alternatives such as AOL, etc. Excuse me, but isn’t there still a 56K cap on how fast a dial up modem can download information? I’m assuming these carriers are tweaking stats a bit to support their “5 times the speed” claims, but what is the REAL lowdown on all this?
It’s mostly via compression and caching. You may see that speed increase in an idealized test but virtually never in the real world.
I can make my DSL “be 5 times faster” than regular DSL. It’s called don’t ever delete the Internet cache.
If MSN’s accelerator works, it’s news to me. I haven’t found it to work well at all.
As I understand it–and as Padeye says–it relies on caching and compression. If you regularly clear out your temporary Internet files and related files, I think it pretty much nullifies any gains from the accelerated version.
It’s a little more complicated than that. Your internet cache has little to do with it. The ISP caches files (entire web sites, actually) on their special cache servers. That way, every single NetZero subscriber doesn’t need to download the MSN homepage. Instead, it’s cached on NetZero’s network.
As more and mroe of the 'net becomes dynamic (like this fine site), this will become sillier and sillier.
It would a require very slow server somewhere for caching at the ISP to make much of a difference, and the sites they cache by default, like CNN, are going to be able to serve faster than your modem can download anyway.
Their claims of using compression to this end are also flawed.
If you are downloading an already compressed image or video, the ISP is not going to be able send that image to you any faster without altering it with a loss of quality.
If they are referring to compressing text and html on the fly, which does have real world benefits, Apache*, the server software that most of the web is served from, already has this feature, and all modern browsers can already decode it. The “5 times faster” claim must ignore this fact.
- I would be very surprised if MS IIS, the server that most of the rest of the web uses, did not have this feature as well.
I never read it but glance…Isn’t there a disclaimer at the bottom saying it doesn’t effect files or pictures or something like that?
Yeah, they admit that it won’t speed up downloads of files, pictures, videos, etc., at all, which is precisely where you actually need the greater speed. There is no magic, alas!
I thought modems already had compression built-in since the 19.2k days or so, so even further compression of the text of a web page cannot be done any more.
I doubt there’s any useful compression happening on these lines.
One “trick” not mentioned is that they have a user-side browser add-on that prefetches pages linked to on the page you are currently viewing. This is supposedly done “in the background.”
Of course, if you don’t click on any of those links, etc. you’ve just wasted a lot of your bandwith. Of all the links on this page, I’m only click on one (maybe 2 if I decide to preview) but that does absolutely no good whatsoever since the page you get when you click on “Submit Replay” hasn’t been generated yet!!!
Of course if you use a different browser, it won’t happen at all.
So the 5* claim is a purely idealized test to impress idiots.
No respectable company would use such software or make such claims. (Which tells you what’s going on inside Earthlink. They also have spyware in their install software.)
The compression used on v.90 and earlier modems isn’t all that great, it’s not hard to noticeably improve performance by employing better compression. The v.92 modem standard adds even better compression. GZIP HTTP content compression used by many servers is even better, and probably the best that can be practically employed. I question whether so-called Internet Accelerators can actually compress better than GZIP can, though I’d imagine they can do marginally better than v.90 or even v.92.
Isn’t the cap somewhere around 45K although it is a 56?
Not to mention the number of firewalls is different on each line or group of lines in a location. You may have the most efficient dial up modem, but it won’t make much of a difference if you have to get through a bunch of local firewalls to get through to your ISP. I had constant connection problems when I was on dial-up, and it turns out many in our area had the same problems as well. Cable modem is more expensive, but definately worth more than the price.
Cy
I’m with ftg on the prefetching. That’s what I thought of when I saw the commercials, and the disclaimer that it doesn’t work for anything dynamically generated, streaming, files/attachments, etc. Web page graphics are accelerated (cite). Upon looking around a little bit, there are plugins available for download that utilize gzipping pages, which may help a little bit too. A combination of both? Don’t know, but getting people to pay 5 bucks a month extra for stuff that can be downloaded for free or at most for a fairly reasonable one-time price seems like the real scam, but hey–people are willing to pay for convenience, I guess.
Interesting info, thanks.
This GZIP HTTP compression interests me, I’ve never heard of it (heard of gzip, of course). Is the decompression actually done at the browser?
From troub’s “cite”:
For this to be true, they have to be resampling the images at a lower quality. You couldn’t get any real benefit trying to compress an already compressed jpeg image otherwise.
Revtim, the gzip http compression is what I was referring to in my earlier post. It’s already built into both apache and IIS, and all modern browsers can already decode it on the fly. The only issue here is whether the setting is enabled on the individual webservers. I don’t know offhand if it’s the default setting, but my server certainly has it enabled.
Yes, the browser itself decompresses the gzipped data stream. I use this feature on a web forum (much like this one, but with far fewer users) that I administer. I cut my bandwith usage in half just by enabling the gzip compression.
Eleusis, you have hit the nail on the head for NetZero. That is exactly what they do.
My brother uses NetZero’s service and showed me how he can turn up the speed, so to speak, by decreasing the graphic quality on the pages he views. It is a control on his NetZero connection panel. It seems to work pretty good, but the difference in speed isn’t as good as what they advertise at. Perhaps 1.5x as fast. When you turn up the speed, your graphics look very pixilated and blocky. I suppose it is a decent alternative if you need something cheap.