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Modem Accelerators? 51

Posted by Cliff from the sounds-like-digital-snake-oil dept.
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I was browsing on the web and came across a reference to Coastal Web Online's claim of a modem accelerator Apparently it is a service which is supposed to make your modem 3x faster. Is this possible? I've already got a v.92 modem and I thought it already did compression. It is possible it is a proxy doing some compression on white space in HTML or something, but I don't think so, since it apparently only works with Windows 9x and Internet Exploder. For $8.00 a month ontop a the dialup access sounds kinda snake oilish. Does anybody on Slashdot use the service? Would they recommend it? This sounds remarkably similar to the old idea of 'waxing your modem'. Am I missing out on something here?"
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Modem Accelerators? More

Modem Accelerators?

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  • modem compression standards. (Score:3, Informative)

    by quinto2000 ( 211211 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @02:23AM (#3110943) Homepage Journal
    There is nothing snake oilish about these compression claims. Only a few ISPs are supporting it, but the v.42 compression standard has been out for a while. Check out this comparison [digit-life.com] to see how it differs from older compression standards. The key is that these claimed ratios are in ideal situations -- ie, when you're downloading a great deal of text, not the high-bandwidth consuming images or video streams. Those are already highly compressed, and so are unlikely to benefit from further compression. In fact, it is a fairly trivial consequence that any compression method will make some kinds of files larger, not smaller. A fatter pipe is the only solution sometimes, and that just isn't going to happen with POTS.
    • Received: from [209.210.78.50] by hotmail.com (3.2) with ESMTP id MHotMailBE52424C00144136E853D1D24E320BB60; Fri, 08 Mar 2002 09:39:24 -0800
      Received: from chad (gateway-office2.cwo.com [209.210.79.102])
      by mail.cwo.com (8.12.1/8.12.1) with SMTP id g28Hcdf4032469
      for ; Fri, 8 Mar 2002 09:38:39 -0800
      Message-ID: 001701c1c6c8$96042f20$6401a8c0@chad
      From: "Coastal Web Online Tech Support" support@cwo.com
      To:
      References: 200203070655.WAA03840@DELETED 003b01c1c612$8cef79a0$6401a8c0@chad 200203072345.PAA26559@DELETED
      Subject: Re: 3xs service
      Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 09:42:14 -0800
      MIME-Version: 1.0
      Content-Type: text/plain;
      charset="iso-8859-1"
      Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
      X-Priority: 3
      X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
      X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
      X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
      Status: R
      X-Status: N

      Yes it will and yes it is.
      ----- Original Message -----
      From: DELETED@hotmail.com
      To: "Coastal Web Online Tech Support" support@cwo.com
      Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2002 3:43 PM
      Subject: Re: 3xs service

      > But will it improve thruput of compressed data?
      >
      > Is this basicly just a compressed connection to a caching proxy?
      >
      > On Thursday, March 07 2002 11:59 am, Coastal Web Online Tech Support
      wrote:
      > > " It works as CLIENT-SERVER technology. What happens is we send you a
      > > CDROM with the software so it will work on your end. Then, when you use
      > > your modem to call our modem, it connects and then your data and
      > > transmissions all gets filtered through a very special piece of HARDWARE
      > > that accererates the transmission speeds." If you would like to try it
      out
      > > i will be happy to send you out a disk.Please let me know.
      > >
      > > ----- Original Message -----
      > > From: DELETED@hotmail.com
      > > To: support@cwo.com
      > > Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2002 10:55 PM
      > > Subject: 3xs service
      > >
      > > > How does this work? Would I get any proformance increase on compressed
      > >
      > > data?
      >

  • They do have technical documentation don't they?

    If the service isn't 'snake oil' then it should be possible for them to explain in a reasonable way how the service work, what part of what your modem does that it accelerates.

    Me, I'm betting they don't - not that I'm going to bother hitting their site to find out since I ain't someone that cares about modems any longer.

    • > I ain't someone that cares about modems any longer.

      really? are you not connected to the net through a modem? You do know what MoDem stands for right? I don't know what I'd do without my modem. (which just happens to be a Terayon cable modem..)

      • I have a 300-baud accoustically coupled modulator demodulator in the cupboard - a leftover from the days when I used to do hardware rather more often than software. I figure on pulling it out in a few years when my son is too old to trash everything, and say something like: "Y'know, Son, back in my day we had to plug the handset into the modem and a-coo-stick-lee couple it to connect to the innanet".

        But I don't think that these modern fibre-optic doohickeys are called modems - at least I have never heard any of the techs I've spoken to call them that. Seems kind of right too, since "modem" kind of implies some sort of analog signal to be MOdulated and DEModulated.

        And just to get back on topic, since it looks from the other comments like there might be less snake oil involved in the claims of these organisations than I first thought, I really do wonder how well they play with all that GZip encoded content smart websites are delivering nowadays.

      • > really? are you not connected to the net through a modem? You do know what MoDem stands for right? I don't know what I'd do without my modem. (which just happens to be a Terayon cable modem..)

        Actually, I don't use a MoDem, I use a CSU/DSU (T1) at home, and T3 at work.

        Some of us have higher standards for our connectivity.

        --Dan

      • Umm...a cable "modem" doesn't actually MOdulate/DEModulate anything, because the signal it works with is entirly digital. Unless I am smoking crack, which I'm pretty sure I'm not, it is actually a *bridge* between two types of network. I bet if you cracked it open, you wouldn't find an ATD (analog to digital) or DTA (vice-versa) chip in there anywhere. They just call them modems because it is comforting to J. Random Luser, who doesn't want (or need) to learn new terms, when old ones do quite well.
        • Nope, a cable modem does plenty of modulation and demodualtion. I'm pretty sure that cable modems use QAM (Quadrature Amplituded Modulation), though they may use PAM (Pulse Amplitude Modulation), which I'm much less familiar with.

          Anyway, they most certainly do have an A/D-D/A in them. QAM (which I'm pretty sure cable modems use) is similar to DMT DSL in that DMT is (more or less) 256 concurrent narrow-band QAM channels, while cable modems (presumably, my biz is DSL, I've never read more than the occassional whitepaper on cable modems) use a single wide-band QAM channel for each customer while the head-unit maintains several of these connections (one for each customer).

          Tim
          • I stand corrected. Thank you for enlightening me, and thank you especially for not making me feel like an idiot in the process (something too many /.ers do, myself included). I suppose I could have just looked that up on google or something...oh well. I always did sort of wonder why they called them modems...figured it was just luser-speak.

            Thanks again.

          • There are cable modem standards [cablemodem.com] called DOCSIS. Not all modems follow these standards. For the modulation demodulation part have a look at the RF specification [cablemodem.com] starting at section 4 on page 23. Upstream uses QPSK or 16QAM, downstream uses 64QAM or 256QAM. I believe that for a given number of homes there will be one downstream signal, but multiple upstream signals. (the number of upstreams would probably not equal the number of homes.)

            For the hardcore RF geeks these specs are a great read. You can see how these specs were designed as opposed to "happened."

          • A network card modulates and demodulates, but you'll get lynched if you call it a modem around other geeks.
        • In reference to your sig....
          isn't it closer to 186,282 miles per second?

  • How it works (Score:3, Funny)

    by UnifiedTechs ( 100743 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:13AM (#3111092) Homepage
    From The Site:

    How does the 3XS system work?
    We send you a CD ROM with your side of the program to load on your computer (a 5 minute process). At our network headquarters, we filter you through our Accelerator Server.
    Once you have installed our 3XS software, even on a trial basis, you can click on and off the ICON to see the difference in downloading web pages, and transferring e-mail attachments on your computer.

    From this I would have to think it is a data compression by proxy server system that uncompresses on the user side, they offer a 7 day trial, if your really curious I suggest trying it.
  • Web accelerators are bunko. While there are a few tricks one can pull to get the most out of their internet connection you're not going to make it magically 3x faster by any means. Optimizing MTU settings and using some HTTP tricks to max out your available bandwidth might garner you a kilobyte every once in a while nobody is going to able to give you a 3x increase on your POTS modem. If you want an apparent speed increase either beef up the disk space allocated to your browser's cache. You can also find download accelerators that will use multiple simulteneous HTTP connections to the same server for the same file and with the packets arriving out of order the accelerator combines them into a single contiguous file. It is nowhere near a 3x increase though.

    • Re:Acceleratotrons (Score:2, Informative)

      by elfkicker ( 162256 )
      I also seem to recall one that would prefetch/cache pages that it knew you went to and commonly clicked links on a page. So while you busy reading the front page of /., the software would have already cached the comments of each story. It's a neat idea and for people you actually have set patterns and do alot of reading I could see how it might give a significant percieved speedup.

      It's a neat idea. I'm sure you could achieve a similiar effect with some type of offline scheduled cache.

      Anyone remember the name of the software?
      • I jet remembered the name... NetJet. Can't find the company homepage so they probably washed out with the tide. I did find an article [internet.com] calling it it NetDeath. The complaint was that when misconfigured it would essentially DoS webservers and quadruple traffic requests. Good for the user, severe bitch for the site.

        http://browserwatch.internet.com/news/story/peak 9. html
      • You can also use features in Mozilla, Konqueror, and IE to save content for offline browsing. It isn't an actual method to speed up your connection to websites but it does let you browse stuff pretty quickly. You can wait for everything to save to disk while making coffee or using the john and come back to do your browsing. One of the cool aspects of Ximian Evolution is the RDP news linker. Now if only Arts and Letters would put up an RDP too!

  • How to modem accelerate as a webmaster (Score:5, Informative)

    by proxybyproxy ( 561395 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @04:49AM (#3111348)
    The best thing I ever did for my modem users, was to install mod_gzip, which compresses every page (be that HTML or any dynamically generated PHP page) apache sends out.

    Result? Up to 92% compression! My pages are loading so much faster than before, AND I am saving on my bandwidth bill.

    Installation is a breeze, the mod is a beauty.

    - the mod_gzip project [remotecommunications.com]
    - scoop article on mod_gzip [kuro5hin.org]
    - some stats [intune.org] for intune.org

    • Re:How to modem accelerate as a webmaster (Score:4, Interesting)

      by HyPeR_aCtIvE ( 10878 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @10:12AM (#3112167) Homepage
      I read a bit on this, and it does seem to have two drawbacks, that noone ever mentions:

      A) It takes more processor power on your webserver. It has to constantly compress files to send ... on a highly loaded webserver, this can make for alot of extra processor overhead.

      B) It takes more processor power on the client. Well the client's gotten it quickly, but now it has to uncompress it. On a massively overpowered machine that is only running a web client at the time, not a problem. But perhaps problems for people with older machines, or running lots of stuff at the time.
      • I have been using my proxy (FilterProxy [sourceforge.net]) to compress web content for me, for over a year. It *does* provide a ~5x speedup for html. You need to arrange to have the proxy running on some server with a fast net connection (i.e. upstream from your modem). The amount of time it takes to compress and uncompress the page is miniscule compared to the amount of time it takes to render it. On a modern ~500MHz or better machine, I can compress any page in <0.01s, so you really don't notice the time that it takes. If you're still on a 486 though...

        -- Bob

      • Re:How to modem accelerate as a webmaster (Score:5, Informative)

        by Tower ( 37395 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @11:02AM (#3112420)
        If the pages are static content, A) can be relieved with caching of the gzipped pages. If you are generating dynamic content (via DB lookups, etc), you'll have more of a hit, but relative to the the lookup time, the gzipping is fairly quick.

        B) you may be stuck with, but on a P100/64MB playing 192kb MP3s while surfing to a fairly involved site (say 500kB/page) the time saved over the link will more than make up for the decompression (yes, I've tried this myself). There was a large discussion on this quite some time ago (probably close to a year), and if the proc isn't pegged on the server, the client still saves time...

        Quick numbers for an actual page (366858 bytes):
        http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/ 04/204622 6&mode=nested
        Raw page transfer: 366858 Bytes /(5kB/s) = ~71.65s

        Gzip time: .3us on a 375Mhz PPC RS/6k with .7 load
        Transfer time: 66240 Bytes / (5kB/s) = ~12.94s
        So, unless the client will spend more than a minute to decompress this file, you will be saving time... decompressing a few .gif/.png/.jpgs for a page will be just as costly...
        • Slashdot already uses gzip'd pages. Considering that the 1st page (366858 bytes) is already compressed, how did you fake the 2nd set of numbers?
          • Not sure why you think they are faked...
            Viewing the page in my browser, it has already been decompressed. Here are the steps.

            Page open in browser (Netscrape in my case)
            I saved off the page (File->Save As)
            listed the size with an ls -l (size = 366858)
            verified with an editor (ez) that the file was uncompressed html.
            gzip [file]
            ls -l file.gz (size = 66240 18% of original size is easily in range for HTML docs)

            ...used the two numbers and a speed of 5kB to estimate simple case transfer times. I used 'time' on gzip to obtain system time spent on that task. Pretty easy to replicate. I suggest you give it a try.
          • That first number is the decompressed number. The decompression occurs before the client can save or render the file. Try it - save the file from a web page (from a gzip compressed page of course) and then look at its contents. Note that it is no longer compressed.
    • I was using it, too, until I discovered it was causing some caching problems on the clients; that is, I had it in front of a webmail program. The user could log out, go back a page or two from the button bar, hit reload, and be relogged in. Since this happens, and we have a lot of kiosks... well, you get the picture. Removing mod_gzip fixed this problem.

      Now don't get me wrong -- I love mod_gzip. I have it installed on my other webservers. Just beware that it's not the holy grail yet.
    • I tried this module out for a while and ended up having to remove it. For some reason pages rendered with PHP would not load at all in IE5 when they were gziped. Not sure what the deal was there but disabling mod_gzip fixed the problem.

      -Lee

  • latency? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by babychess ( 452803 )
    Even if this was possible, compressing text files, or removing whitespace from HTML, latency wouldn't change. In many situations, latency is more of a concern as simple "speed". If you're using Emacs over SSH for example, each character that is typed needs at least the minimum ping time to be displayed, regardless of compression.
    • Funny you should mention that. I was just here http://freshmeat.net/releases/71619/
      "The wondershaper neatly addresses these issues, allowing users of a router with a wondershaper to continue using SSH over a loaded link happily. "
      wondershaper speeds things up by dropping packets.Well sort of. Maybe you should read it yourself.
  • 3XS Minimum Requirements

    ...
    Either one of the following: Windows 95b, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4, Windows XP Browser: Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher web browser (currently does not work with Netscape browsers).

    This must be some pretty kooky compression scheme that it can only work with one brand of browser.

    • This must be some pretty kooky compression scheme that it can only work with one brand of browser.
      That'd be the scheme that is kooky, not the compression. It probably uses an IE-only API to hand off the decompressed material (that is, something that Netscape doesn't support).

      Pretty bass-ackward compared to putting the compression a few layers down, where ANY internet enabled app (say, an email or FTP client) could access it.

  • What the... (Score:4, Funny)

    by JediTrainer ( 314273 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @09:53AM (#3112085)
    We send you a CD ROM with your side of the program to load on your computer (a 5 minute process).

    Is this the new FedEx super-express delivery I've been hearing about? How much does it cost?

  • Sounds like.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by perlyking ( 198166 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @10:02AM (#3112119) Homepage
    it might work a bit like this open source software [freshmeat.net].

    Recompress jpegs with higher compression, remove banner ads. Gzip the remaining page and hey presto faster download, though of course that doesnt need any client side software apart from a browser that will accept gzip compression (most do).
    I guess these guys are using some proprietary or obscured format for their compression, to help them cash in.

    Not much use to those on fast connections but for a modem user the time taken to encode/decode may be faster than downloading the normal pages.

  • I'm stuck on pots (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tkrabec ( 84267 )
    I've been toying with setting up a compressed SSH stream to my webserver and installing Squid on that. I server a few small sites so Processing power is not a big deal. I'm not too sure that SSH will help me much. I've already installed a local Squid server and I block ads, that helps a bunch. I'd love to get more Idea's.

    -- Tim
  • In order for your modem to receive the data in a compressed format, whatever is sending the data has to compress it using the same algorithm. Thus mod_gzip works. But it will only work on things that are compressible in the first place. Will your mp3s come down the pipe any faster? Of course not. Compressing a compressed file with a different algorithm will get you minimal gains. The short answer: no, other than tweaking the packets a bit (ie MTU, etc), you can't 'accellerate' your downloads.
  • Does anybody on Slashdot use the service?

    I do, and I like it.

    I've had one-way cable, ADSL, and two-way cable. The new house does not have broadband, and there's no planned arrival date from either the cable company (AT&T) or Bellsouth. I can get ISDN, which is about twice as fast as what I currently have, for a ridiculous amount. Or I can get satellite, which is $70 a month but installation is almost $1,000.

    So any way to increase my current speed is welcomed, and their service does the trick. I haven't measured it with a stopwatch, but the pages load faster.

    The service I'm using is ProxyConn [proxyconn.com] .

    They offer a free week trial, so if you're really interested in the service, give it a try!

    • ProxyConn's homepage brags that it "Works with all browsers / operating systems!".

      However, if you dig a little deeper into their "Technology" page, you find that it works with any MS-Windows OS and only IE and Netscape browsers.

      Never forget to read the fine print!!
  • http://www.quickcat.com

    We co-brand this stuff too. It works, but it's not mind-blowing technology.

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