SlipStream Data Embraces Competition in Dialup Acceleration

One thing's certain: if you're in favor of competition, you're certainly not an RBOC, even you compete as vigorously as anyone else.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [December 2, 2005]

Ron Neumann, president of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada-based SlipStream Data was thrilled when he overheard us telling a fellow journalist at ISPCON that the dialup acceleration market is the most competitive. (He's paid close attention to ISP-Planet ever since we wrote the article Dialup Acceleration A Two Car Race back in 2003.)

Neumann loved the idea that he was in a tough, competitive market, and quoted me directly from the stage.

Clearly, he's not an RBOC.

At ISP-Planet, we believe that any ISP offering dialup should also offer acceleration, and that every ISP should test the various available products from Artera Turbo, Propel, QuikCAT, Bytemobile, ICT, Proxyconn, and Slipstream Data. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and each company in the industry has a proprietary method, often involving compression, to deliver web pages faster over a dialup connection.

I want it all, I want it NOW
SlipStream Data's latest announcement at the conference was its NOW technology. The idea is easy to explain: initially, the accelerator downloads a blurry image at each image location on a web page. After the entire page is downloaded, the images are improved until they come into focus.

This is another step forward in the area in which SlipStream Data has always excelled: getting the key information displayed first. The first version of the accelerator displayed the text before downloading images (it displayed placeholders). The NOW technology is a refinement of the earlier strategy.

But the process of implementing NOW was much more complex than it might seem. "It's a patented approach that we developed from the ground up," Neumann tells us, talking to us over the phone several weeks after ISPCON. "We ripped out the old standard delivery mechanism and replaced it with something, invented by us, that delivers a relatively poor quality graphic relatively quickly, and then the graphics get clearer."

Business at the edge
The company has also built in a configuration checker that looks for problems such as .dll issues. SlipStream works with the ISP to populate a database of issues for the app to lok for.

SlipStream Data has a new MSP edition (as opposed to the SP edition, developed for wireline ISPs) that is designed for cellular Internet services. Dialup accelerators are especially good with low bandwidth technologies like 1xRTT which has a limit of 144 Kbps (as opposed to EVDO which has a limit of 2.4 Mbps).

SlipStream Data is working to upgrade both the SP and MSP editions to improve connections that operate at higher speeds. "We used to be able to improve connections only up to about 384 Kbps," says Neumann. "Now we can accelerate connections as fast as 1.5 Mbps."

Profits
The bottom line, Neumann says, is doing fine. "Unlike our competitors, we have been profitable for three years. We have sixty employees now, having tripled that in three years. And we're the market leader."

But in a market this cutthroat, everybody claims to be the market leader.

— End