Applications

Dialup Acceleration A Two Car Race

Two companies, SlipStream Data and Propel, are competing to offer dialup acceleration to ISPs.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [April 16, 2003]

When one racing car leads the way, it leaves just behind it an area of reduced air friction, called a slipstream, that those just behind can use to their advantage. The car in the slipstream uses less fuel and experiences less wear to achieve the same speed as the lead car. Two companies are that close in the dialup acceleration race—we describe SlipStream Data, a startup that is just behind the leader, Propel.

SlipStream Data, a Canadian startup based in Waterloo, Ontario, is targeting its dialup acceleration service to ISPs, ASPs, and carriers. The company was founded by two professors at the University of Waterloo's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department: En-hui Yang, a data compression expert, and Ajit Singh, who specializes in networking, parallel processing, and distributed computing.

Communications and Information Technology Ontario (CITO), a state government non-profit organization, provided C$150,000 in seed capital for the startup, and a first round of investment added C$1.5 million. The company came out of stealth mode in May 2002. It remains privately held. Its main shareholders are the two founders and venture capital firm EdgeStone Capital Partners.

The company does not disclose financial information, but currently claims 15 employees, so it is still small. The company is also not disclosing the pricing of its product, but said that it is priced on a revenue share basis, and varies depending on the size of the ISP's subscriber base.

In its press packet, the company notes that its major competitor is Propel and says, "Propel offers their solution as a service. Many ISPs want to run their own in-house service and we provide them with this opportunity." We at ISP-Planet recommend testing both solutions before opting for either. Earlier this month, Propel released a solution that allows ISPs to host Propel as a service.

The company's clients range from the high profile IKANO, an infrastructure provider with at least 600,000 users and United Online (see "NetZero Joins 'Broadband-Lite' Club" in Related articles) to local ISPs such as Tiverton, Ontario-based BMTS/BMI, with 20,000 users, and Execulink Internet, a London, Ontario-based ISP with about 30,000 users. .

The technology
The company's data acceleration platform speeds HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, and POP3 transactions, and the company claims it also supports third party applications. The company says its product is as easy to install as a proxy server.

It also claims that the product can retain and use even small amounts of "prior intelligence." Combined with an engine that serves text on a page before the data, the company says its product significantly speeds up "Time to Text" (T2T) on major websites.

For example, if an unenhanced dialup user accessing Amazon takes 38 seconds to get the text and 51 seconds to get the full page, a user with SlipStream Data's accelerator would require only 12 seconds to get the text on the first view (and 20 seconds to get the whole page). That user would achieve even greater time savings on their second visit, when the company projects they would take only 3 seconds to get the text, and only 9 seconds to download the entire page.

The company says that the client provides one-click access to the Internet, that users do not have to start multiple applications or configure any proxy settings themselves.

End users can customize two aspects of their SlipStream Data client. Users can choose to download low quality images and then right click on any images they actually want to see. Users also have access to a premium optional content filter that can block rich media ads and certain websites.

The client is a 700 K download that requires 4.7 MB hard disk space (a smaller client is available for Microsoft Windows CE devices). The regular client can run on the following Microsoft operating systems: Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, NT, and XP. The company claims the same client works on all operating systems, so service providers can push the same software to all (Windows-using) customers.

The deployment
The accelerator is a client-server application. Its components are called (unsurprisingly) SlipStream SP Server and SlipStream SP Client. The server requires a dedicated IP address and installs like a proxy server, so it should be simple for most ISP administrators. The server uses RADIUS authentication for access and can employ further access controls. It logs unauthorized access attempts.

If an ISP already has a caching system in place, SlipStream SP Server can use that caching system to enhance its own caching functions or even replace them completely.

When a user requests a Web page, the SlipStream SP Server retrieves the page using a broadband connection, and then optimizes and compresses the content for delivery.

The bottom line
As ISPs continue to strive to find services that provide the same return that the phone companies get with, say, Caller ID (where a service costing pennies per month can be sold for $100 per year), dialup acceleration remains an intriguing option, even though it will never offer the rate of return of monopoly services.

ISPs and end-users are aware, however, the products in this area were, in the past, released by unscrupulous companies. ISPs need to examine the pricing and performance of any product they adopt.

On the other hand, most other value-added services seem to promise only about a dollar per user per month in revenue—or even less—and not every subscriber will use them. Dialup acceleration promises more. For an ISP that does not offer broadband, in an area without any broadband options at all, dialup acceleration will be particularly beneficial.

— End