Re: ISDN compression. (fwd)

MegaZone (megazone@livingston.com)
Thu, 10 Oct 1996 10:20:08 -0700 (PDT)

Once upon a time Ian M. Smith shaped the electrons to say...
>I would think that compression wouldn't do any good for video
>conferencing, as I would hope that it is already compressed by the
>video system. ISDN compression would be good for web pages, and
>better yet, for a TCP or UUCP link doing mail and news.

Actually compression doesn't do much good these days for end user traffic.
The bulk for end user traffic is HTTP - most of that content, bit volume
wise, is images or applets. Both are either uncompressable or close enough
that it doesn't matter.

The next level of bit traffic is FTP transfers and a bulk of those are
mostly compressed/gzipped/zipped in the first place. Or, again, are
images.

Over all compression doesn't make much of a dent in the bulk of traffic,
and it is unheard of to hit the limits that theory puts forth.

All of these are reasons that we didn't pursue compression in the first
generation of product - it really doesn't matter for the majority of
users. But since so many people want it anyway, we're doing it in the
PM-3.

-MZ

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