Gprs

[tavarich]

Do any of you use a proxy server with your GPRS connection. Would that speed up the download time to any great degree?????

[Joey Boy]

Do any of you use a proxy server with your GPRS connection. Would that speed up the download time to any great degree?????

no,no

[Plus]

I think you already have a "proxy server" - the Dtac/Ais server your phone connects to.

[autonomous_unit]

Yes, but you would want a proxy you configure yourself.

There are two things about GPRS to keep in mind:

1) low bandwidth

With your own remote proxy server on the Internet, you can run filters to strip out advertisements, large images, animations, etc. to reduce the amount of junk that must be pulled over GPRS to view a page. This helps with sites that do not have their own low-bandwidth mode (try the text only version of thai visa!)

When I was stuck with GPRS, I connected to my proxy via SSH port-forwarding with compression enabled in GPRS. This also helps because lots of the text content of the web is very compressible. The images often are not, however, so the benefit here depends on the type of sites you visit.

2) high latency

By having a proxy you can get more connection reuse, so there is not a slow round-trip establishment of new TCP sockets all the time over the GPRS link. Your browser needs to keep connections open to the proxy and also do request pipelining if the proxy supports this.

Also, by having the remote proxy strip out many of the advertisements, some of the slower multiple round-trip web tracking bugs and other annoyances will be resolved by the filtering proxy instead of by your browser.

These benefits are not without their costs, as they may cause some sites to misbehave. No doubt, the creators and operators of such sites think it is evil to use proxies like this. I think it is evil to operate such sites, so I was OK with abandoning them in favor of other sites that were more proxy- and filter-friendly.

[tavarich]

Yes, but you would want a proxy you configure yourself.

There are two things about GPRS to keep in mind:

1) low bandwidth

With your own remote proxy server on the Internet, you can run filters to strip out advertisements, large images, animations, etc. to reduce the amount of junk that must be pulled over GPRS to view a page. This helps with sites that do not have their own low-bandwidth mode (try the text only version of thai visa!)

When I was stuck with GPRS, I connected to my proxy via SSH port-forwarding with compression enabled in GPRS. This also helps because lots of the text content of the web is very compressible. The images often are not, however, so the benefit here depends on the type of sites you visit.

2) high latency

By having a proxy you can get more connection reuse, so there is not a slow round-trip establishment of new TCP sockets all the time over the GPRS link. Your browser needs to keep connections open to the proxy and also do request pipelining if the proxy supports this.

Also, by having the remote proxy strip out many of the advertisements, some of the slower multiple round-trip web tracking bugs and other annoyances will be resolved by the filtering proxy instead of by your browser.

These benefits are not without their costs, as they may cause some sites to misbehave. No doubt, the creators and operators of such sites think it is evil to use proxies like this. I think it is evil to operate such sites, so I was OK with abandoning them in favor of other sites that were more proxy- and filter-friendly.

Thanks, that helps alot I will be saving that bit of wisdom in a separate file, as I have come to expect TV people to give some great information. Thanks again.