A growing body of new products are trying to ease the connection woes of slow Internet links by compressing the network itself. The push is for ISPs to offer these technologies as perks to entice users, but while impressive on paper, all share the same Catch-22 caveats inherent in the nature of compression itself.
The reduction of patterns in data with smaller representations is already an integral part of digital communications; everything from the telephone network to your modem already uses compression to achieve the speeds we are now accustomed to.
"The network bandwidth is becoming more readily available and cheaper," said Wayne Morris, director of corporate strategy at BMC Software Inc. "But we seem to find new and innovative ways to chew it up."
With that in mind, BMC has just released Patrol/IP Optimizer, which promises to compress TCP/IP traffic without any added hardware. The typical network compression model, said Morris, is to imbed compression technology into the actual network hardware, such as routers. By keeping it in software - and above the physical network layer - a much greater and more consistent throughput is attained. "The intervening routers don't have to worry about doing the compression/decompression," he said, but instead can "concentrate on what they do best, which is route packets."
Morris admits that Patrol's effectiveness depends on the type of data being transferred over the line. "In a binary file like an executable [program], you don't get as great a compression ratio as you get if it's a multimedia file, where you can get really good compression going," he said. The program monitors itself, so in those cases where the performance does not improve by increased compression, it stops.
Naturally, there is always a trade-off to any performance gain, and in the case of compression, efficiency itself can be the victim. Sometimes the data cannot be compressed, and the resulting output may actually be larger than its former, uncompressed self. This is one of the hurdles in reducing network traffic: Compression efficiency depends on easily discerning the content. True random noise, for instance, cannot be compressed at all.
Qin Zhang, a researcher at Dartmouth University's Dartmouth Experimental Compression Systems, believes research being done on building a generic compression toolkit - one not based on any particular data type - looks promising.
"We want to run that program and have the compression be automatic for any set of data," he said.
Similarly, Fourelle's entry in the compression market is also data-type specific. A hardware/software combo, the Venturi Bandwidth Multiplier is essentially a proxy server between a Web server and a network connection - such as a modem dialup line - that compresses everything that goes out from the server.
"Basically, we intercept that data, compress it based on data type and optimize the protocol so that you thin down the amount of transactions and the way they occur across some narrow bandwidth link," said Fourelle co-founder Patrick Glenn.
"What we've been able to do is come up with a throughput game that a 28.8-Kbps modem is faster than a 56-Kbps modem," he said.
Alongside compression technologies, network resource allocation software, like that offered by Packeteer Inc., is also looking to ease the strain on networks.
Packeteer's technology uses the flow control mechanism inherent within TCP as a way to deliver bandwidth guarantees - in effect, ISPs can charge tiered rates based on those guarantees.
The device itself is a piece of hardware that fits between a router and the rest of the outbound network, and no software on the client side is necessary - and no strain, either. "[If] you compress, you have to decompress on the other side. [Our product] is a transparent thing between," said spokesman Bob Quillan.
"Right now," said Quillan, "users are feasting on all-you-can eat kind of bandwidth." But this buffet table, he thinks, will inevitably close. "UUNET's talking about the consumer demand for bandwidth doubling every four months."
Which means that companies like Packeteer, BMC, and Fourelle should see plenty of demand for their products.
