Dial-up users to get near broadband speeds!

[SeeMoreDigital]

Have any of you guys come across a company called OnSpeed (http://www.onspeed.com/).

According to their information, they're stating they can provide near broadband speeds to dial-up customers by using a unique 'on-the-fly' compression system.

At the moment they are having difficulty compressing files that are already compressed, such as Mp3, jpeg, zip etc. These are currently halved in size (which is a darn good start). However the new version will make them up to five times smaller.... amazing!

Just imagine what would happen if this technology could be used with broadband too?!

Cheers

[r6d2]

Interesting indeed. However, it works like a proxy. Any page with heavy contents you request has to be deferred to their serves and gotten back. They compress images lowering the quality. Hmmm... I'd have to see it to believe it. They give you a money-back guarantee though.

[bond]

Originally posted by r6d2
They give you a money-back guarantee though.well if you send me 1000€, i will also give you a money-back guarantee :D

sorry, i couldnt resist ;)

[SeeMoreDigital]

I'm more interested in there claim that their new version will compress already compressed files by up to 5 times.

How the hell are they able to do this. I can't imagine the worlds media companies liking it very much!

Cheers

[mpucoder]

There are several American companies offering the same type of acceleration. Among them NetZero and AOL 9.0
It does nothing for uploads or protocols other than http. That includes p2p, ftp, ssl, etc.

[bit-wise]

It's the same speal that NetZero is doing - 5x faster dial-up speeds (which is about broadband speed). They do the same thing, a massive proxy for static content and compress the HTTP stream. They also have a disclaimer as long as your arm about when you won't experience any speed increases.

But your right, you can't compress mp3, jpeg, zip, etc. so if they figure that out (which they won't), they'll make millions on the algorithm alone!

Also what they fail to take into account is that most large sites which have an admin that has a remote clue, flip on gzip compression on the output stream. This means that the browser receives the HTTP stream already compressed, so again, you can't compress what's already compressed.

[mpucoder]

Well, 5x 56K is nowhere near Comcast's 2M downstream speed.
I also believe their claims are also for plain text pages, not already gzipped (which more and more servers are doing since most browsers now accept gzip content)

[Nic]

Halving MP3 files thru compression?! More lies and spin to get people to part with their money.....such a shame.

-Nic

[mpucoder]

I suppose you could halve the size of a vob file. Just demux it, send it as elementary streams with the redundant headers (SEQ, GOP, etc) sent only once, and then reauthor it at the receiving end :)

[r6d2]

They might not be entirely out of their minds. I user reported the other day that by using a compressed folder on a NTFS drive the VOB ocuppied only 50% of its original size.
Originally posted by bond
well if you send me 1000€, i will also give you a money-back guarantee We have a deal. The check is on the mail. Where do I download your compressor? :D

[SeeMoreDigital]

Well I'm still peeved that I can't take advantage of the 30MB of webspace offered to me by NTL!

Try as I might I can't work out how to upload / contact their server(s) which would be useful bonus, seeing as though I already have more than 100MB of files ready for download (at a very slow 128k upload speed).

At the moment many of them are zipped, but it would be great if a new 'on-the-fly' compression format could be made!

Cheers