There seems to be some confusion (in another thread) on what the compression is and how to use it. I thought to rather start a new thread on this.
Most ISP's use this technology for good reason, including MWEB and MTN to improve service levels. Vodacom also uses such a system on their GPRS and 3G networks.
The data compression system consists of a server somewhere in the Vodacom network (close to the Internet access point) and a client on your laptop, the Vodafone dashboard.
Data compression will attempt to squeeze the packets coming down to you so that you get a higher effective throughput. I've seen 500Kb/s doing FTP on some occasions on my datacard! This can only be good, I got more than what I paid for.
Another thing the data compression server does is to do IP management for you. It'll keep TCP/IP sessions alive (at the server side) that otherwise might have timed out and would require a reconnect on the client which slows you down and eat more bandwidth.
Often when you browse the web, you end up on pages with large numbers of graphics and pictures. These take a long time to download and obviously eat into your 1G. Most of the time you don't need the graphics or at least don't need them in a highres format.
The data compression server will dynamically recompress these graphics into a lower res format and insert it into the web page. The result is you get a faster download, use less of your 1G but still see the page, albeit with 'crappy' looking pictures.
The only downside of this is sometimes you might want the highres version. In this case you just reload the picture required with 'shift-R'. This will download that spesific graphic again.
You can easily work out that it's much better to download 99% of web content compressed and then reload the few you want uncompressed. The nett result will always be a bandwidth saving.
If you don't want this feature, you can easily turn it off on your dashboard under Tools->Options->Programs->Compression. Now your graphics will load normally but you download the full page size.
I would like to see a more sophisticated client on the dashboard that will allow me more control over the compression settings, for example turrn of jpg recomression per URL. So if you browse web sites with lots of pictures
and you want them highres the first time, you can do so.
How about it Vodacom3G?
Most ISP's use this technology for good reason, including MWEB and MTN to improve service levels. Vodacom also uses such a system on their GPRS and 3G networks.
The data compression system consists of a server somewhere in the Vodacom network (close to the Internet access point) and a client on your laptop, the Vodafone dashboard.
Data compression will attempt to squeeze the packets coming down to you so that you get a higher effective throughput. I've seen 500Kb/s doing FTP on some occasions on my datacard! This can only be good, I got more than what I paid for.
Another thing the data compression server does is to do IP management for you. It'll keep TCP/IP sessions alive (at the server side) that otherwise might have timed out and would require a reconnect on the client which slows you down and eat more bandwidth.
Often when you browse the web, you end up on pages with large numbers of graphics and pictures. These take a long time to download and obviously eat into your 1G. Most of the time you don't need the graphics or at least don't need them in a highres format.
The data compression server will dynamically recompress these graphics into a lower res format and insert it into the web page. The result is you get a faster download, use less of your 1G but still see the page, albeit with 'crappy' looking pictures.
The only downside of this is sometimes you might want the highres version. In this case you just reload the picture required with 'shift-R'. This will download that spesific graphic again.
You can easily work out that it's much better to download 99% of web content compressed and then reload the few you want uncompressed. The nett result will always be a bandwidth saving.
If you don't want this feature, you can easily turn it off on your dashboard under Tools->Options->Programs->Compression. Now your graphics will load normally but you download the full page size.
I would like to see a more sophisticated client on the dashboard that will allow me more control over the compression settings, for example turrn of jpg recomression per URL. So if you browse web sites with lots of pictures
and you want them highres the first time, you can do so.How about it Vodacom3G?
