Artera and International Bandwidth

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rockett

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I'm trying out the free trial with www.arteraturbo.com at the moment.

This type of accelerator software poses an interesting bandwidth problem for telkom:

If I surf www.mybroadband.co.za without the accelerator the bandwidth remains in ZA and comes straight to my modem.

If I surf www.mybroadband.co.za with an accelerator program such as artera which is based outside of ZA then the full bandwidth first of all goes across international lines to (in this case) artera's servers and then the compressed bandwidth (let's say 50%) comes back across international lines to my modem.

Comments...
 
rockett said:
I'm trying out the free trial with www.arteraturbo.com at the moment.

This type of accelerator software poses an interesting bandwidth problem for telkom:
Click to expand...
Poses more of a problem for the user if they've exceeded their capping doesn't it?
 
Yup - need to get the ISP's to install it.
You never know, maybee the okes at SAIX would be willing to set-it-up on one of their servers, but i'd bet that it costs a fortune. What's it like, I'm willing to spend some time helping to pressure them to look at it...
 
bwana said:
Poses more of a problem for the user if they've exceeded their capping doesn't it?
Click to expand...

Yes - completely agree. If you've blown your cap and want to access a local site then you are best disabling it. You can do that on artera with a very quick click which is fairly convenient.

If you haven't blown your cap then it should improve both your speed and bandwidth usage at the expense of telkom having to carry the local traffic (150% of the local traffic) across international lines.
 
stoke said:
Yup - need to get the ISP's to install it.
You never know, maybee the okes at SAIX would be willing to set-it-up on one of their servers, but i'd bet that it costs a fortune. What's it like, I'm willing to spend some time helping to pressure them to look at it...
Click to expand...

TelkomISP have already installed an accelerator and it works if you connect to them via dialup and it works fairly well. However, when you connect to them via ADSL it does not work. The accelerator checks to see who you are connected to and if it's not TelkomISP (via dialup) then it will not enable the feature. This is logical because then all ZA ISPs would encourage their users to install it and the bandwidth would all go through the Telkom servers.

What is not so logical is that TelkomISP haven't enabled this for ADSL yet. When I asked them about this they said that they were working on making it available but not sure if I believe them. (Remind me to apologise to them here if they do make it available.)

If TelkomISP make the accelerator available on ADSL it will improve the users speed and bandwidth but Telkom will still be hit by the same (well actually more) international traffic. So if Telkom are making their money by using the 3Gb cap then it's not in their interest to provide this accelerator.

Of course, Telkom themselves could use an accelerator on the international lines with overseas hubs which would improve their own cost of carry on international lines...
 
Artera

rockett said:
I'm trying out the free trial with www.arteraturbo.com at the moment.

This type of accelerator software poses an interesting bandwidth problem for telkom:

If I surf www.mybroadband.co.za without the accelerator the bandwidth remains in ZA and comes straight to my modem.

If I surf www.mybroadband.co.za with an accelerator program such as artera which is based outside of ZA then the full bandwidth first of all goes across international lines to (in this case) artera's servers and then the compressed bandwidth (let's say 50%) comes back across international lines to my modem.

Comments...
Click to expand...
Rockett, Artera may put a Data Center in ZA. The nice thing about Artera is that it works with broadband.(dsl,satellite,cable,E1,etc...)
 
walter said:
Rockett, Artera may put a Data Center in ZA. The nice thing about Artera is that it works with broadband.(dsl,satellite,cable,E1,etc...)
Click to expand...

Where did you hear that they would do that? Would make a lot of sense for them to target the ZA market because of the 3Gb etc. cap. They could basically offer to double the bandwidth that you get per month and also dramatically improve the speed because they would be local. ZA is very good target market because very few countries have caps like we do.

I'm surprised that TelkomISP haven't jumped in and offered that to South Africans already because they have the software which the dialup users can use for free and then they could lease (per month) the software to other non-TelkomISP users...
 
Artera

rockett said:
Where did you hear that they would do that? Would make a lot of sense for them to target the ZA market because of the 3Gb etc. cap. They could basically offer to double the bandwidth that you get per month and also dramatically improve the speed because they would be local. ZA is very good target market because very few countries have caps like we do.

I'm surprised that TelkomISP haven't jumped in and offered that to South Africans already because they have the software which the dialup users can use for free and then they could lease (per month) the software to other non-TelkomISP users...
Click to expand...
Rockett, now that I think about it. Artera would not have a material effect on bandwidth usage as far as your cap is concern. First, when your browsing, the only thing thats sent to the Artera server is the request. The Information is sent back to you compressed, therfore reducing the bandwidth. If anything, Artera would reduce bandwidth for the ISP. By adding a server in ZA, it would reduce the number of hops. You probably wouldn't notice the bandwidth speed. How is Artera working for you(speed).
 
walter said:
Rockett, now that I think about it. Artera would not have a material effect on bandwidth usage as far as your cap is concern. First, when your browsing, the only thing thats sent to the Artera server is the request. The Information is sent back to you compressed, therfore reducing the bandwidth. If anything, Artera would reduce bandwidth for the ISP. By adding a server in ZA, it would reduce the number of hops. You probably wouldn't notice the bandwidth speed. How is Artera working for you(speed).
Click to expand...

Walter, I think it will have an enormous impact on your cap. The speed/bandwidth issue is directly proportionally related. The way that they increase the speed is by packing more data into your bandwidth using compression right?

So say you typically consume 100Mb/day while surfing without artera. Then you switch on artera and surf the next day and again do a typical day's surfing and again consume 100Mb - except that this time artera has compressed that 100Mb into 50Mb and only 50Mb has moved down the wire to you and so you've only used half of your daily budget (assuming you're on the 3Gb cap).

Route1: You <--> Telkom <--> server
Route2: You <--> Telkom <--> artera <--> server

With route1 you have no compression and with route2 you have whatever compression artera can muster. Telkom count the bandwidth that you use which will be (say) 50% of route1 when using artera.

As far as speed goes I find that the web is much slower since I've installed artera but I believe that's a problem to do with telkom at the moment and so I need to wait for them to solve their speed issues before commenting on artera's performance. See here for my telkom log:
http://www.headvert.com/random/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=18

But my hope with artera is not speed but extra bandwidth.
 
Artera

rockett said:
Walter, I think it will have an enormous impact on your cap. The speed/bandwidth issue is directly proportionally related. The way that they increase the speed is by packing more data into your bandwidth using compression right?

So say you typically consume 100Mb/day while surfing without artera. Then you switch on artera and surf the next day and again do a typical day's surfing and again consume 100Mb - except that this time artera has compressed that 100Mb into 50Mb and only 50Mb has moved down the wire to you and so you've only used half of your daily budget (assuming you're on the 3Gb cap).

Route1: You <--> Telkom <--> server
Route2: You <--> Telkom <--> artera <--> server

With route1 you have no compression and with route2 you have whatever compression artera can muster. Telkom count the bandwidth that you use which will be (say) 50% of route1 when using artera.

As far as speed goes I find that the web is much slower since I've installed artera but I believe that's a problem to do with telkom at the moment and so I need to wait for them to solve their speed issues before commenting on artera's performance. See here for my telkom log:
http://www.headvert.com/random/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=18

But my hope with artera is not speed but extra bandwidth.
Click to expand...
Hey Rockett, go to www.toast.net and try the free bandwidth speed test. Your speed should improve with Artera, although there could be some issues with your ISP. Also, go to options/ performance on your artera console. You can increase your performance levels.
 
Artera

walter said:
Hey Rockett, go to www.toast.net and try the free bandwidth speed test. Your speed should improve with Artera, although there could be some issues with your ISP. Also, go to options/ performance on your artera console. You can increase your performance levels.
Click to expand...
Hopefully, your bandwidth should improve. I certainly hope so. You can get more mileage out of your cap.
 
Well I'm not very impressed with Artera anymore.

I have problems when I try to update/upload my web site and also when I auto upload FTP files to a certain site. It also causes POP/SMTP to freeze up until I've disabled it.

I've sent a few emails to their support department but heard nothing back from them.

So I guess I won't be converting the trial to the subscription then...
 
Just an update in this thread:

Artera did get back to me and it turns out that my problem is because I'm using their product over a LAN which it doesn't support. I believe that this product is designed for a dial-up modem.

They are working on a version that will run on a LAN but it has not been released yet - If I've understood them correctly.

If anyone knows any different then please feel free to jump in and correct me. I will be sending Artera support the link to this thread so that they can reply if I've said anything inaccurate.
 
the only thing compressable in a web page is the html text itself. All the images, gif, png , jpg, etc are already compressed and cannot be compressed any more. Take a gif file (like one of the buttons on this page) and zip it using max compression. Notice there is almost no size difference ? What is by far the biggest portion ( traffic wise ) of a website? The images of course.

Obelix
 
Obelix: What these compression/accelerator programs do for images is to reduce the quality of the image which is how they make it smaller and they do a very good job and can cut down the images to up to a quarter of their size.

The obvious downside is that you have a lower quality image. If you're surfing for porn then this is obviously a big problem but a lot of the images that are downloaded are buttons etc. and those can be 'compressed' without loss of functionality.

Most accelerators have a switch that allows you to set the amount of image quality loss and you can disable this if you find a page with an image that you want to save locally.

Of course, I will agree with you and anyone that this reduces the pleasure of surfing the net but when you are using it as a work tool and are seeking content and not presentation this can be a very attractive option.

Thanks again for your comments :)
 
Rockett

rockett said:
Thanks for the heads-up xanex - I'm trying it now.

They don't offer image compression (yet) so they shouldn't be as fast as artera but it is designed for DSL while artera is designed for dial-up so let's see how it works out.
Click to expand...

Rockett, Artera is design for any connection. I use it with my dsl right now. Untill Artera releases its SOHO or business version, you cannot use Artera if you are behind a router (lan).
 
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