[twocows]

Ok so i found two pieces of software that sound like they maybe using the same idea. I think all i-net accelerators these days use this idea anyway.

first one is a commerical product called Onspeed.
It says:

As you cannot physically change the speed of your Internet connection, ONSPEED uses a technology called Content Sensitive Compression ('CSC') to individually compress each element of a web page or email content using various compression algorithms based on a nine Patent approved proprietary technology.

The end result is that your web pages and emails (PC only) load and download as quickly as if you were on a Broadband connection.

When your web browser requests a Web Page, the ONSPEED software redirects that request to the ONSPEED Compression Servers. They take the respective Web Page content, compresses it and sends it back down to the ONSPEED software which decompresses it and sends it to the Browser requesting the information. At the moment we have dedicated algorithms for:
Photo-realistic images (e.g., JPEG, PNG, GIF, and BMP)
Line Art and Drawings (e.g., GIF, BMP)
Animated objects (GIF)
HTML objects
Text, etc
Office Documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
Macromedia Flash

now theres another part that onspeed put way way way down and here it is:

* For MAC and PocketPC users, ONSPEED will only accelerate your web browsing. MAC and PocketPC email acceleration is available use of a web mail service. If you do not have a web mail service, we recommend Web2Mail, which can integrate with your POP3 email accounts.

ok now for toonel.net (its free. java based)

Toonel.net exploits a tunneling technique combined with data compression. It runs compressed data frames from toonel client to one of the toonel servers and then these are forwarded to the target host. Reducing the size of resources that are transferred between the server and the client makes more efficient use of the user's bandwidth.

Virtually any TCP traffic

HTTP, E-mail, FTP and other TCP/IP data traffic can be tunneled through Toonel.net thereby having the advantage of been compressed.

In addition to HTTP content compression toonel.net also contracts HTTP negotiation process by compressing http headers. Same advantage is valid for POP3, SMTP and IMAP protocols.

and a picture of toonel.net: http://www.toonel.net/res/mac.gif

I tried toonel.net and no i can not say i felt any speed boost at all. while looking at the application i can see that it is indeed doing the compression with its progress bars. no speed boost

what do you guys think?

[CharlesS]

Here's what I think: snake oil. Many of those formats they listed (JPG, GIF, PNG, etc.) are already compressed. Indeed, the formats that take the most time to download are almost always going to be already incorporating some sort of compression, due to the fact that they're large, and it's logical to try to find some way to mitigate that.

The thing is, when you're trying to compress data that's already compressed, you're never going to get any sort of significant savings. If the Onspeed compression is significantly better than the compression of the file, you might be able to make the file a little smaller, but it is not going to be noticeable.

If you want broadband speeds, you're just going to have to get a broadband connection...

[twocows]

CharleS,

i got to thinking about what you said and ya you're right however one thing stands is those reviews on their page and awards. could they be REALLY OLD or are they faking them?

[CharlesS]

Ah - I looked at the Macworld review, and now I think I understand what they (Onspeed at least) are doing. They're not trying to compress an already-compressed image as I thought they were doing; they're turning down the quality setting on the compressed images, using the same compression the images use but at a higher setting. I suppose this could theoretically speed things up on dial-up (although you'd have to factor in the time to download stuff to their proxy server and process it), but I highly doubt it would give you speeds equivalent to broadband, and you know what? Turning the quality level way down on the images would make everything look pretty crappy. I really doubt that would be worth the monthly fee. The Macworld review says that this would be useful when you just want to read the text and don't care about the images, but you know what? You can turn off the loading of images in Safari's preferences for free. Or you could use Lynx.

Of course, looking at toonel.net, it seems to be free. But then again, it seems to be just compressing the files with GZIP, which is essentially what I originally suspected. Which means, it won't speed up images or other already-compressed files to any significant degree. These files, naturally, are the ones that take the most time to load. Of course, these folks don't seem to be claiming that it will speed up images, so there you go. So this will speed up text files to some small degree, and probably not much else. I wouldn't expect any miracles.

If you're wanting broadband speed - I'd just get broadband. It's not that expensive these days, and there's really no substitute for it.

[twocows]

CharlesS,
Thank you very much for the great reply!
I now understand Onspeed's gimmick more clearly.

I wish there was a way to try Onspeed without paying for it.

If Onspeed does use proxy servers then it wouldnt benefit anyone in my opinion but they say they dont or at least i understand that they dont. only the software you download that does the whole "magic behind the scenes". correct me if iam wrong.

currently i am in iraq and I get internet wirelessly so ya bit of a boost or image degradation is OK as long as things are sped up a bit.

[tooki]

Here's my opinion:

Those accelerators sorta do what they promise -- on pages with lots of images. By reducing image quality, it does take less time to download.

That said, download speed isn't the only factor in web browsing speed! Latency -- the door-to-door amount of time it takes for a single communication to occur -- is very important to web browsing speed, and is much higher on dialup modems than it is on broadband, and accelerators will increase latency, not reduce it.

Here's an analogy: think of an internet connection as a convoy of trucks, going back and forth. The speed that ISPs list (Kbps or Mbps) is analogous to the size of each truck: one truckload carries more. Latency is the amount of time the truck makes to take one round trip: this is a function of how fast the truck travels and how long it takes to load the truck.

Broadband's trucks travel far faster (on the order of 10x as fast), they have a far more efficient system to load them up, and they hold a lot more cargo than dialup's trucks. The accelerators are like hitching a trailer to the trucks when needed: they can carry more cargo now, but it takes longer to load the truck before it can leave again because you have to hitch on a trailer each time, and take it off at the other side.

Here's where this gets important: web browsing involves tons of back-and-forth communication of VERY small messages. It takes a lot of such banter to begin loading the page, before any image downloads can begin (and each image file requires more banter). No dialup accelerator can make this happen faster, because it's not the truck's payload that is the limiting factor, it's the truck's maximum speed. The trucks are traveling mostly empty at this point, so the time to load the truck isn't the bottleneck, either.

Hope this helps.

tooki

[alm]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Turning the quality level way down on the images would make everything look pretty crappy. I really doubt that would be worth the monthly fee. The Macworld review says that this would be useful when you just want to read the text and don't care about the images, but you know what? You can turn off the loading of images in Safari's preferences for free. Or you could use Lynx.

that is not quite correct.. Reducing quality of JPEG down to 90% makes the image almost twice smaller and you hardly see any artifacts... unless you were a photographer

[alm]

Originally Posted by tooki

Here's where this gets important: web browsing involves tons of back-and-forth communication of VERY small messages. It takes a lot of such banter to begin loading the page, before any image downloads can begin (and each image file requires more banter). No dialup accelerator can make this happen faster, because it's not the truck's payload that is the limiting factor, it's the truck's maximum speed. The trucks are traveling mostly empty at this point, so the time to load the truck isn't the bottleneck, either.

Hope this helps.

tooki

http://www.toast.net/performance/ - they measure speed for text only, text+image and image only. With an accelerator the speed is better for text and text+image...

PS some accelerators reduce latency by combining several HTTP headers into one packet. the result is _very_ noticable in satelite connections (where packets roundtrip is about 2 seconds) because the number of TCP acknowledgements is heavily reduced

[alm]

Originally Posted by twocows

CharlesS,

I wish there was a way to try Onspeed without paying for it.

If Onspeed does use proxy servers then it wouldnt benefit anyone in my opinion but they say they dont or at least i understand that they dont. only the software you download that does the whole "magic behind the scenes". correct me if iam wrong.

currently i am in iraq and I get internet wirelessly so ya bit of a boost or image degradation is OK as long as things are sped up a bit.

There are too many factors that can affect i-net speed.. It depends on load of their servers, on performance of your mobile, the way you use i-net, type of your connection.... E.g. if you load a lot of compressed files (mp3, zip, exe) you should not expect great benefit (satelite i-net is an exception here).. if you use email a lot - these acceleretors will help you even if you send/receive zip files (do they support emails?) I think there is the only way for you - try it. I beleive that OnSpeed has trial or money back period, Toonel is free..

There is one more thing to mention.. When you specify to use proxy in your browser it starts behave a bit different. With no proxy, browser starts to render page as soon as it gets information - you can see an image or part of the image straight away. With proxy on, browser browser shows page when almost all elements of the page are loaded. So there is a psychologic effect - in the first case you feel that something is going on, in the second case you see nothing for a while and you are getting bored ;-) .. even if the second option is faster ;-)

PS it seems that Toonel added JPEG several days ago into Generic Package, I think they will add it into other packages soon.
PPS do not forget to clear browser's cache if you decide to compare acceleretors