Caching

Caching in on Cell Phone Browsing

BoostWorks is already a success in Europe and Asia, where the mobile Internet market is in full bloom. So the company is bringing its direct-to-browser content accelerator to the U.S. in search of mobile Web clients.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [February 28, 2001]

BoostWorks is a content accelerator company that was founded in France in 1989. Its content accelerating product does not require client-side software, as it operates from software loaded on a proxy server. BoostWorks uses Web browsers to accelerate data delivery directly to a browser.

Overseas fashions
Chris Borghi, Director of Marketing for BoostWorks, said that the company's legacy products are popular in Europe, and such products as BoostSQL and even BoostVT for mainframes remain very popular. However, he added that the company's recent sales surge is with telco products for wireless users, like mobile phones and handheld Web appliances—not Web content providers.

Initial sales success has come from large telcos, such as NTT DoCoMo (currently in trials), France Telecom, and Cable and Wireless Optus.

One early adopter client is Euromaster, a chain of tire and service stores that is a division of the also-French tire company, Michelin. Euromaster had just deployed a new point-of-sale application but it was too slow for real-life use. So BoostWorks stepped in to improve the performance of Euromaster's network units twelve-fold. As a result, the company's sales force at work in the field could obtain a level of service that approached that of the traditional client-server architecture with sales reps glued to their chairs.

Compatible content delivery
Since BoostWorks is located on a proxy server on the Web-side of the service and not on the client side, it is compatible with virtually every browser and operating system—from the oldest HTTP 1.0 compliant browser to new Netscape and Internet Explorer releases.

On the network side, BoostWorks performs four tasks:

1) It recognizes the client's browser and determines which type of compression it leverages, then optimizations the browser so it can support new compression programming.

2) It uses GZIP compression and can support up to 10 levels of text compression, although most users stick with BoostWorks' default settings and do not use all 10 levels of compression.

3) It recognizes GIF and JPEG graphics and can support up to 7 levels of graphics compression. Additionally, savvy users can fine tune the compression levels, object by object.

4) It optimizes the HTTP protocol and shapes the traffic so text is sent ahead of graphics and the end-user starts to see content almost immediately, if not in entirety.

Selling like bandwidth
Borghi is optimistic about the sales prospects BoostWork's software because bandwidth prices of mobile services are increasing and Internet companies are looking for ways to decrease content delivery costs.

"It's a real money saver," he said. "It's priced significantly less than a load balancer, about $10,000 per CPU, but it's synergistic to load balancers and web switches. Our company motto is 'accelerating the last mile,' and in doing so, we feel we've been proactive, rather than reactive to the ISP marketplace."

Borghi believes that BoostWorks will be sold to ISPs in the U.S, specifically to service providers that have a significant subscriber base of mobile and wireless clients. Borghi figures that those ISPs will either resell BoostWorks service as a premium content delivery program or simply take it to market as a competitive advantage—delivering Web content on the fly to mobile users on the move.

—End