ISPs looking at dialup acceleration should check out software from a company which, while not top of the market in the U.S., is certainly no dog.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [February 12, 2004]

The dialup acceleration space is one of cutthroat competition, and ISPs that are considering offering this service have to do their own research. Our articles highlight the options that are available, making the choice easier, but in the end there's no substitute for testing this stuff yourself.

What makes the market competitive, the tests complicated, and theory interesting is that the companies in this space each seem to offer something unique. We contacted QuikCAT because we heard that the company's dialup accelerator was the cheapest on the market, and available to ISPs of all sizes. But the company's founder, Dr. Olurinde E. Lafe, says ISPs should not assume that a lower price means lower quality.

Lafe says his company, Lafe Technologies, was founded in 1993 to research data compression and encryption and technologies for moving data across networks. Early on, he says the company was assisted by research grants from the NSF, NASA, and other federal agencies.

In 1999 it created the spinoff QuikCAT to market its compression technology. "We have nine patents awarded (plus more pending) on compression and data delivery architecture," enthuses Lafe. "We use our own compression schemes, with better technology than is available on the open market."

Lafe says that QuikCAT has two main features that distinguish it from the competition: use of Cellular Automata Transformed (hence CAT) and content sensitive compression.

The mathematics of cellular automata are associated with controversial mathematician Steven Wolfram and his book A New Kind of Science. The essential idea is that given an equation with many contingent variables (adjacent cells), a plethora of different results can occur from similar (but not equivalent) starting points, a discovery that has been useful in cancer research. But how useful it is in dialup acceleration only you can judge.

Content sensitive compression is a very promising technology, and several companies are competing to do it better. Lafe says that only his company is selling a standalone compression application, called the Miliki Super Compressor, which validates the potency of his company's compression technology.

"Our competition uses zip-like compression or, with images, reduces the quality of the image, not the size of the file. They'll take 90 percent quality down to 40 percent quality," says Lafe. "Our software is able to analyze the content of any data. We use special difference content algorithms for each content type."

Debbie Harris, QuikCAT vice president of sales, points out that not every accelerator can speed up e-mail (by compressing attachments) in addition to speeding up the Web.

Pricing and availability
The product is available now. Pricing was not disclosed at press time but depends on the size of the user base, whether the ISP is rolling out the product to all of its users (which is preferred) or is selling it to some of its users, and the level of competition in their market.

"We want to compete and we want are partners to be successful," says Lafe. "Pricing varies not just within the U.S., but we also have to adapt to conditions internationally."

"There's no initial setup fee," adds Harris, which makes this relatively attractive for smaller ISPs. "We try to come up with introductory pricing so that an ISP can grow their subscriber base, and then increase prices as the number of subscribers grows. The royalties we get depend on the ISP growing."

—End