Could IDNET provide "ONSPEED" like service

[ChrisW]

Firsty, I am VERY pleased to join IDNET after leavind Plusnet.

In order to alleviate speed problems at PN I reactivated my old subscription to ONSPEED, which had a significant impact on download speeds.  Of course this works by reducing the data download necessary to render each WEB page.

My question is, since this kind of technology reduces bandwidth demand, would it a be a good idea for IDNET to provide an "ONSPEED" type of service to provide faster browsing and protect network capacity.

[maxping]

Hi Chris and welcome to the forums.
I have used Onspeed when i had dial up but i don't know if you would notice the speed with Broadband,i know it said it seeded surfing up but was under the impression it didn't make downloading faster.
Its been a while since i used it so they have probably  now found a way to speed d/loading up.

[ChrisW]

Sorry I should be a little more precise "ONSPEED" is more or less specific to surfing, but during my recent dark days of being vilified by my old ISP for "excessive bandwidth usage" the majority of my usage was browsing, modern WEB sites with high density of graphics are changing the pattern of BW usage. I am seeing around 3 to 4 times speed improvement when browsing (3-4 X less BW demand).

I don't want to be an advert for "ONSPEED" but if IDNET provided similar compression technology we could all be winners.

[maxping]

I will jib out here mate its well over my head 

I'm sure the teckys will be along soon

[Adam]

I am no expert but I believe OnSpeed simply works by compressing images and such like on web pages. There is many other ways to achieve the same effect using other free options such as Firefox addons, and things like Google Web Accelerator.

Adam

[ChrisW]

Yes, you are correct and thanks for the links to free apps., not spotted before.

All of these apps require a server to compress data and / or reduce graphics resolution. My point is, would it not be better if that server was at IDnet rather than Google or Helium or wherever? Then we do not need to rely on an outside agent. Is there sufficient interest to make a request to IDnet?

[RJM]

I think you will find that "On-Speed" is only designed for up to 2mb broadband and not the max service.

I am afraid when I saw it in action, I wasn't at all impressed.

A friend a mine installed  it to try and the most disappointing area was when we visited various sites with live picture feeds - the degradation of the pictures was awful.

I couldn't comment on whether it speeded up downloads or not.

[Adam]

The problem as I see it would be the amount of servers and bandwidth required would far outstrip the demand for such a service. It looks like a fairly simple solution but when really looking at the problem it requires a lot of processing power to deal with the requests quickly and a lot of storage to cache web pages.

I also don't see how IDNet would benefit from such a feature which would most likely be a bad investment choice for the company. Also there is many existing solutions out there which is just as good as, if not better, then IDNet could offer. For example; Google's product uses cached data to speed up page loading and to save bandwidth. It's needless to say Google's cache is much larger than IDNet's.

Interestingly NTL/Virgin Media send all their web traffic through transparent proxy servers which most likely uses caching to save bandwidth. On such a scale I imagine it could save the company a fair amount, but many users complain as they sometimes receive an out of date version of a website.

Adam