After years in training in the hostile climate of the cellular industry, one company is bringing its accelerator to the dialup ISP market.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [February 27, 2004]

If you haven't heard of the accelerator company Bytemobile that's not because it's new (it was founded in 2000) but because the company was founded to serve a tougher market than dialup ISPs.

The company's first customers were cellular providers ranging in size from SaskTel Mobility, a Canadian ILEC, to Vodafone's operations in Australia, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.

"Our heritage, as the corporate name indicates, started with mobile carriers, and then extended to enterprise and ISP markets," explains Paul Tocatlian, the company's director of sales for its new ISP market, and a former director of channel development at Propel.

"The ISP product is fairly mature," says Tocatlian, "it's the same code base deployed within another market." The only element that was left out is error resiliency. Although link errors are a key problem in mobile networks, they are not an issue for dialup ISPs.

Bytemobile had to add only one feature: compatibility with the RADIUS servers that dialup ISPs use but which are uncommon in the mobile industry.

The product is carrier grade and like many carrier grade products, it's available on SUN, but unlike many, it was originally developed on Linux.

The standard, carrier class configuration for the Bytemobile ISP product is delivered on a SunFire B100 Blade Server and B1600 chassis, and can be clustered. The entry level version is delivered on a SunFire V120 1U server. A Linux version will also be available in the future.

Bytemobile's key feature is that its product offers clientless as well as client-based optimization. Even though the performance of the clientless acceleration is not as good as that of client-based, ISPs seem pleased to have the option.

Says Doug LaDuron, CEO and president of Lawrence, Kans.-based SeriousISP, who replaced a proprietary accelerator with the Bytemobile accelerator, "some of the smaller ISPs who are competing for the $9.95 per month market don't want to force their users to download anything. Now they can offer 3x speed for $9.95 against companies offering accelerated dialup at $13.95 or $14.95."

Adds Evan Katz, founder of Stamford, Conn.-based wholesaler DialAssurance, "no downloads makes it cheaper for us."

Of course, the Bytemobile product has other features as well. Tocatlian says that Bytemobile's integration into the Winsock layer on a PC means that the software is transparent to the browser and all e-mail clients. "There are no setup changes required, such as pointing the browser to a proxy," he notes.

The product uses proprietary algorithms to compress various attachment types, speeding e-mail. The product also does advanced caching to extend the browser cache. "Some of our competitors add a secondary cache, but this increases the footprint of the app on the hard drive and can be tough to manage," he says.

The product also does protocol acceleration. IP protocols like TCP/IP were built for slower computers. Dialup accelerators can ask more of the modern computer, realizing efficiencies thought impossible as recently as a few years ago.

Tocatlian says the company also has a patent pending technology called dynamic interleaving. "It reduces the number of transactions required for data transfer. On average, there are 50 to 100 objects on a Web page, though this can vary. We reduce the number of round trips by trying to get all objects at once, instead of just two at a time. This gives us a huge advantage on first page visits."

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