Networking – Increasing network speed on low bandwidth

bandwidthnetworkingoperaPROXYvpn

I'm struggling with the following issue:

Given a computer with low-medium CPU/RAM capabilities, and an extremely poor network connection. Poor means here 10-15 kb/s. I would like to do something to increase the usability of this machine. I would be very happy with a solution works on HTTP(s) protocols, but if it works on TCP/IP layer, that clearly would be a plus. We are talking about EDGE technology, and as far as I know, the modem doesn't use hardware-based acceleration. Currently I have the following 3 ideas:
(if you have a completely different idea please share with me as well)

  1. using some kind of proxy
  2. using VPN
  3. Opera Turbo

Option 1:
I have a server with great bandwidth and 0-24 availability. I think, that must exist an out of the box solution (maybe a proxy), which could be helpful in this situation. Routing the traffic through a remote computer, and using an agressive compression on texts (and maybe on images) would be a trivial but powerful help. However I couldn't find a proxy like this.
Question: Do you know a proxy like this? Or any other similar program?

Option 2:
I vaguely remember, that VPNs can use compression before encrypting. My idea would be an bandwidth oriented VPN (high compression rate, low encryption rate) on the remote server, where the client could connect to.
Question: If it's a completely stupid idea, just correct me. If It could work, please give me a hint, how can I implement this.

Option 3:
I got this tip from one of my collegaues. It would work on HTTP only, but it's okay. I can't try it right now, but that seems a very simple and effective solution.
Question: Will it work truly? And is there any browser-independent solution like this?

Additional infos:

  • Windows XP
  • Currently I'm using Firefox
  • Security is not an important aspect

Best Answer

Your problem goes deeper: GPRS in general and EDGE in particular are tough grounds for TCP connections due to the unreliable nature of the transport medium and the constantly changing, incredibly high round-trip-times of the data packets. Transmissions would be painfully slow not due to the fact that EDGE is slow but due to the fact that internal TCP counters would time out repeatedly, retransmissions would be triggered multiple times filling up the narrow link and reducing the transmission windows. There has been some prior scientific work dealing with this topic. One of the efforts resulted in the publishing of a paper by the University of Cambridge (which is an interesting read) and apparently the implementation of the GPRSWeb Proxy software, which has not been released to the public. You may want to contact the authors or the faculty if you need more information on this topic.

Opera Turbo indeed uses some of the techniques described in the aforementioned paper and they work quite well, but if you are looking for a browser-agnostic solution, take a look at Ziproxy:

Ziproxy is a forwarding (non-caching) compressing HTTP proxy server. Basically, it squeezes images by converting them to lower quality JPEGs or JPEG 2000 and compresses (gzip) HTML and other text-like data. It also provides other features such as: HTML/JS/CSS optimization, preemptive hostname resolution, transparent proxying, IP ToS marking (QoS), Ad-Blocker, detailed logging and more.

It would not address the protocol-specific issues of GPRS, though.

I would not use VPN links with enabled compression - it likely will not help your problem since the transmitted data is compressed already most of the time: most webmasters are using GZIP compression for HTML and CSS and image data is compressed as well and cannot meaningfully be re-compressed with lossless methods - i.e. without resizing and/or transcoding.

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