Today is International Internet Day. It celebrates an event on the same day in 1969 where a college student at UCLA attempted to transmit the word ‘LOGIN’ to his colleague at Stanford.
They actually only managed to send the ‘L’ and the ‘O’ before the system crashed but a subsequent attempt to send the entire word was successful.
In 1969 the network connection would have been slow and laggy and probably not capable of sending much more than a few characters. Nowadays of course we are consuming large amounts of data with video being one of the top applications. Some studies suggest up to 84% of all internet traffic by 2020 will be video.
This is hard to believe when it wasn’t that long ago I was connecting my home PC to a 56kbps modem and using 1.44MB floppy disks to transfer files! Showing my age there but you get the jist!
Many of us now take it for granted that we have much faster connections that transfer at rates of tens or even hundreds of Mbps, however this is a first world luxury. Replify has customers who still have satellite connections that only provide a few Mbps of bandwidth.
Add in high latency and packet loss introduced by transmitting your signal to a communications satellite above the earth along with sharing this connection between several users, the 56kbps modem starts to seem appealing again!
For users on these connections, Replify’s WAN Optimization product can make a big difference. Our TCP optimization reduces the effects of latency and packet loss and our compression and caching algorithms ensure that they are able to pack as much data as possible across that slow link.
For more information on how Replify Accelerator technology can help you speed up slow connections, contact sales@replify.com.