New technology may impact SA Internet

Johannesburg, 03 Oct 2003

The launch of Peribit Networks` new Packet Flow Acceleration (PFA) product could have a significant impact on the South African Internet environment, with its traditional bandwidth problems, says the company.

"Latency has long been a problem with the Internet, as the further a server is away from the person doing the downloading, the slower the transmission becomes. In effect, one gets stuck in the World Wide Wait," says Shane Buckley, president of Peribit Networks Europe.

"The problem lies in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which requires end-to-end control of a transmission, meaning that every time it sends a packet, it needs to wait for acknowledgment from the other machine that this has been received, before sending the next one.

"In a TCP environment, the server usually spends more time waiting for the information to be delivered than it does in actually downloading the information," says Buckley.

He says that working with standard TCP is the equivalent to the flight controllers at Johannesburg International Airport waiting for an individual aircraft to taxi to the end of the runway and then take off, before sending the next one.

"The difference with PFA is that it would be like lining all the planes up behind one another so that as fast as they can get into the air, the next one can follow."

According to the company`s exclusive South African partner, Source Consulting, PFA enables Peribit Sequence Reducer products to deliver LAN-like application performance across the WAN by speeding application response up to four times.

Peribit`s Molecular Sequence Reduction (MSR) technology - originally developed to assist with DNA sequencing - offers instant capacity gains of up to 10 times.

Source Consulting MD, Jack Ward, says the reason this is possible is due to the technology`s ability to find variable-sized repeating packets anywhere in the data stream, across multiple packets, applications or sessions, and replace these with much smaller characters.

"Up to 90% of network traffic is repetitive, so by simply replacing the recurring information with smaller labels, the MSR technology eliminates replication and can thus massively increase capacity.

"While PFA is the type of technology that could easily be sold as a separate product, we have chosen to offer it, MSR and our quality of service guarantees as a single package to new customers, while existing ones will get PFA as part of an upgrade package."

According to Buckley, PFA is presently undergoing beta testing with three large local corporations, with full scale roll-out expected by the end of the month.

"The beauty of PFA is that it makes all response times appear as if they are local. As far as we are concerned, the combination of PFA and MSR has created a technology that will change the way networks are built."