7192 A couple of weeks back in OS X Odyssey I was growling about the glacial speed (a highly relative term in this instance) with which Apple's recently redesigned Website loads over my rural dialup connection which gives me 26,400 bps throughput at best.

"It's hard not to infer that if Apple doesn't have it in for us dialup users, at least they have cast us adrift. Macs - even portable models - no longer come with internal modems," I complained.

Here in the outer boonies of Nova Scotia, broadband Internet is simply not available, unless you're willing to cough up the junkie-dealer cost of a satellite connection, and a lot of us here are in the same boat - 22 per cent of Nova Scotians still don’t have access to broadband. That’s 200,000 people or 93,500 households, and 5,600 businesses in a province with a population under 1 million. Reportedly, it's a similar story in many rural and even not-so-rural suburban areas of the U.S., and in much of the world outside North America.

Last fall I costed out satellite broadband service from various ISPs., and the cheapest deal I could find then worked out to a bottom line of more than $3,000 over a two year contract (that figure included the purchase of a dish and modem plus installation, setup and licensing fees, so there would be some equity in used hardware at the end of the two years), locked in with a punishing penalty for early cancellation. Plus I would still need dialup service for weather-related satellite outages. That's more than I can afford or justify.

Revisiting the issue a couple of weeks ago, I found that one ISP, Xplornet, now offers entry level (512 Kbps download/128 Kbps upload) satellite service for Can$59.95 per month plus Can$249.00 installation (mileage to outlying areas such as where I live extra), plus the cost of the dish and modem, but without a locked-in contract if you pay a premium up-front "system access" fee of Can$299 instead of Can$99 with a two-year contract. Still pretty steep, especially for those relatively poky (for broadband) throughput rates, which you can double or triple for monthly rates of Can$99 and Can$149 respectively. This deal is somewhat more tempting than what was being offered a year ago, but still way too expensive when folks nine miles up or down the road can get DSL for Can$35 a month.

However, there is another avenue of at least partial relief available. My ISP, Aliant, offers a "Dial-up Accelerator" that the company claims can speed things up by a factor of "up to" 19x compared with a 56K modem, through "proprietary text and image compression, content caching and other network optimizations". However, it only works with Website loads, (and email downloads if you're running Windows), and will not speed up software or music downloads or streamed media content. It also doesn't help with secure pages, such as those used for online banking and credit card forms. The cost is Can$4.95 extra per month, but I have been skeptical, since I figured the main bottleneck is the crappy telephone lines between here and the switching substation 10 miles away where fiber optics begin.

However, I bumped into a neighbor of mine on the beach a couple of weeks ago who said he had been just about to give up Web surfing after moving here out of frustration with the slow throughput until he got the Dial-up Accelerator, and he has been reasonably satisfied with the improvement in speed. He uses a Windows PC, and I still was apprehensive about Mac support but decided to give it a try, and guess what? - the thing actually works.

Now let me qualify that. This is still nothing even close to broadband speeds. I just timed Apple's Press Info page, which is one of the quicker-loading pages on the Apple Website, and it took 45 seconds (35 seconds before the text appeared). The Apple Store still takes a leisurely 2 minutes and 10 seconds to load, but believe it or not that's a big improvement over what it has sometimes taken over this connection without the Accelerator, and a reload of the Apple Homepage after it was cached took just five seconds, and some Web pages load amazingly quickly with the Accelerator enabled. This is using Safari 2.0.4. Within context, I am impressed.

Also intrigued. Unfortunately, Aliant is not very interested in Macs and their tech support folks tend to be blissfully Mac-ignorant, so I wasn't able to find out much about the software from them, and Aliant's support pages on their Website for the Dial-Up Accelerator are almost exclusively Windows-centric other than noting that a Mac version of the software is available and the system requirements.

However, a bit of digging determined that the Dial-Up Accelerator software is actually a product of http://www.slipstream.com/ Slipstream Data Inc. - a privately-owned, Canadian software development company based in Waterloo, Ontario, in fact a a subsidiary of BlackBerry smartphone maker Research In Motion (RIM), and thus presumably a heads-up outfit.

Through some more Googling, I discovered that two professors at the University of Waterloo initially designed a compression software algorithm several years ago, and after making the discovery, the men, En-hui Yang and Ajit Singh became co-founders of SlipStream, which started selling the technology to ISPs in 2005, with their product quickly becoming the most widely deployed Internet acceleration technology in the world globally. Slipstream has now partnered with more than 900 other Internet Service Providers around the world to make the Dial-Up Accelerator available to their customers.

"This [technology] will become something that most ISPs offer as a value added service and will, in fact, extend the life of dial-up Internet access," SlipStream president Ron Neumann is quoted commenting, adding that Internet surfing speeds with dial-up modems will be five times faster with the Web Accelerator software, which compresses, optimizes and streamlines Web content after it leaves the server with a compression rate about 40 to one for text and two to one for images which results in improved Web browsing because pages on the screen appear faster. "The speed the data moves is the same as usual but because the data is compressed, we are able to get more across in the same about of time," Neumann notes.

Happily, SlipStream seems to be more than tokenly interested in accommodating the Mac market. The latest version of SlipStream SP - the SlipStream SP6.0 Macintosh client, now supports Intel-based Mac computers. SlipStream SP6.0 includes seamless integration with Safari, while other mainstream browsers are supported with manual configuration. Unfortunately, the software does not work with Mac OS Classic.

However, I was right to be skeptical about the full Dial-Up Accelerator functionality being available for the Mac. While the Windows version of the software also accelerates email clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express, and Eudora for Windows, and FTP transfer acceleration. POP 3 email and FTP acceleration are not supported on the Mac - only HTTP, which is a bit disappointing.

Still, the extra speed running browsers is much appreciated. Safari (and IE 5 if anyone is actually still using it with so many good browsers available for the Mac) are supported automatically. Manually configuring proxies in other browsers is a minor hassle ( the proxy is 127.0.0.1 through port 5400 if you're interested), but so far I've found it works fine with Opera 9.50 and SeaMonkey 1.1.3.

There are some downsides. Image quality is downgraded to varying degrees depending upon how much speed (ie: compression) you utilize, but if you want a significant speed improvement, you need to be prepared to live with lower image quality. From my perspective, in most cases this is not a major concern, and the trade-off in time saved is worth putting up with low image quality. If you need higher resolution image quality on a particular page, just adjust the slider on the Dial-Up Accelerator "Images" panel all the way to "Slower" and compression will be disabled.

Another thing to watch out for is that you may run into problems with secure Web pages, such as online banking sites. I've had mixed results. I've found that my bank's secure pages work with Safari, but not with browsers I've configured manually with the Dial-UP Accelerator proxy configurations. This is a minor inconvenience, but there are so many good OS X browsers available that you can always keep one in reserve and un-proxyed for use on secure sites.

SlipStream SP6.0 Macintosh client Minimum System Requirements
• 333 MHz PowerPC G3 processor or Intel processor
• 128 MB RAM
• 6 MB of hard drive space
• OS X 10.3 or later
• Safari 1.0 or later (other mainstream browsers supported with manual proxy configuration)
Note: As of version 6.0, Intel Mac systems are supported.

If you're still on dial-up and your ISP offers SlipStream's accelerator technology, I think it's a worthwhile boost. Just how worthwhile quickly becomes evident using a browser that isn't proxy configured to support the Accelerator. I'm already noticing that some of my routine tasks such as posting stories on Applelinks have speeded up immensely, making the extra five bucks a month well spent in terms of time-saving and less frustration. If your dial-up ISP does not offer this enhancement, it's well worth bugging them to get in touch with SlipStream and get with the program:
http://www.slipstream.com/our_solutions/mac.html


Charles W. Moore

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