Ericsson, World Online turbo charge wireless Internet

Ericsson South Africa has signed a strategic deal with global Internet Service Provider (ISP) World Online to launch a new service that speeds-up Web page downloads by up to four times to South African mobile Internet users.

Known as WebOnAir Filter Proxy, the product allows users to filter and compress information they are downloading from the Web to suit a smaller screen and a slower, wireless connection.

WebOnAir will allow World Online to provide fast wireless Internet access on the Vodacom network at no additional cost to the end-user.

Although the product is mainly designed for use with notebook computers connected to the Internet via a mobile phone, it can also be used on handheld devices such as PDA`s, HPCs with browsers running Windows CE or EPOC operating systems, explains Thomas Soneson, Director of Customer Solutions at Ericsson South Africa.

"For users, WebOnAir makes wireless web browsing significantly more attractive, further supporting remote usage and wireless Internet accessibility. It is practical and easy to use, adding convenient benefits when using wireless Internet Services," said World Online Managing Director, Graeme Victor.

With WebOnAir, average downloading becomes two to four times faster. Depending on the graphical character of the information, the time to download a simple web page with WebOnAir is reduced from 60 seconds to 20 or faster.

"The biggest user benefit is for accessing large documents or typical graphics - intense home pages that currently take, for example, 3 minutes to download over a wireless data connection. That same information can be accessed in 1 minute or less with WebOnAir - downloading time that makes web services attractive for wireless users," said Victor.

The product works by filtering out non-essential HTML code by adapting image quality and compressing data before it is transmitted to end users. Users can set their preferences by adjusting compression settings from their browser. Users could choose, for instance, to see colour images in gray scale instead, or remove background images from a web page.

The WebOnAir Filter Proxy consists of two components, a Gateway Proxy and a Client Proxy. The Gateway Proxy is placed between the mobile client and the Internet, at the ISP`s (World Online) domain. The Client Proxy is installed on a laptop or PDA device where it interacts with the standard Web browsers.

All Web access to the Internet is passed through the Gateway Proxy, which optimises the download in several ways, for example:

• Graphic images are compressed in various ways (user selectable)

• Graphic images are converted to more efficient formats

• Selective HTML elements are filtered out

• Objects (images, etc.) are pre-requested from the web servers

• HTTP requests are compressed

• HTML and text are compressed

The user can set up configuration profiles in the client meaning the user can decide which compression and filtering features are activated in the gateway.

By using the WebOnAir Filter Proxy, this wireless Internet access service can be enhanced without any changes in the network.