On Mon, 2 Sep 2002 22:49, Jason Lim wrote: > > What do you do on the net? > > Lots of email... lots of mailing lists... i imagine that compressing > emails (of which i get maybe 50-100 each day... a chunk of that is spam, > but nonetheless it uses bandwidth) would yield very high compression > rates.
Email does compress reasonably well, but having your mail server in another country raises an entirely new set of issues. There's issues of support etc. As you have probably noticed I have a lot of experience of this... Also email (excluding file attachments which are usually compressed) is not that big generally. Of course if you have people emailing you word files then it may be a different issue. >From what I hear net access by cable modem or ADSL is becoming quite popular in Australia, which gives you at least a gig a month before any additional fees apply. Probably the best thing for someone who wants cheap net access in Australia is to route it through someone's ADSL link, it gets you similar benefits of an escape from per-minute charges for modem access, and good access for support in the same time zone. Also sharing an ADSL link via 802.11b with IPSEC is a good option. > > Web access? It's mostly jpg and gif transfers. > > True... but saving on all the txt would help too. The text is a small minority of the bandwidth, so the data savings through compression of it will not amount to much. > Okay.. obviously there are implications to this... streaming video and > games would obviously not be smooth, since the data is being routed > through HK from Australia... but I imagine for things like IMAP, POP3, > general HTTP, and other such uses would benefit from maybe saving at least > 1/3 to 1/5 of the bandwidth. > > What do you reckon? Doable? Such things are worth trying. Also there are benefits for privacy in such things which are already being investigated. Don't let my skepticism prevent you from doing any research that you feel needs to be done. ;) -- I do not get viruses because I do not use MS software. If you use Outlook then please do not put my email address in your address-book so that WHEN you get a virus it won't use my address in the >From field.
