Dialup Acceleration Market Remains Competitive

Here at a very busy ISPCON, the dialup acceleration providers are out in force, offering genuinely different solutions in a market that's as cutthroat as ever.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [November 5, 2004]

Overall ISPCON is very busy, and it feels like everyone is here in Santa Clara. One area of intense competition is dialup acceleration, and as competition heats up in the dialup acceleration space, each company claims a different core strength in its offering. It's like the DHL ad says, competition is bad for them but good for you.

We got here a day early, and met with two dialup providers that day. San Jose, Calif.-based Propel, an acceleration industry veteran, is focusing on image quality. The company says that users want all the acceleration but without image degradation, and David Murray, executive vice president, is working hard to deliver better images at the same speed.

Meanwhile, Dean Tucker, CEO since July, is bringing a renewed focus on ISP customer service. Some readers had complained to us in the past that Propel was not receptive to small ISPs, and Tucker and Rebecca Barthel, vice president of marketing, are working on improving the ISP experience.

The company, with over 50 employees, has three devoted full time to supporting small ISPs and two devoted full time to supporting large ISPs, with the whole team pitching in if necessary.

Propel had several announcements, including version 5.0 of its software and a Macintosh version that has a genuine Macintosh look and feel thanks to the Apple background of its designer and of the Propel team.

For small ISPs, the most interesting announcement was Propel Complete, a fully outsourced service offered at a flat rate of $500 per month serving up to 5,000 users. Propel continues to argue that ISPs should offer acceleration to all subscribers, but gives ISPs the choice of whether or not to do so.

Slip into something more comfortable
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada-based acceleration provider SlipStream Data is more focused on larger ISPs, expanding its sales force abroad, and on reaching smaller ISPs through partners such as wholesale dialup providers. Its most recent highly publicized customer win is United Online.

The company says it will soon be able to win speed tests against its competitors. The company's CEO, Ron Neumann, has both an engineering and business management background, and is very proud of the company's technology.

At ISPCON, the company announced SlipIn technology, allowing it to partner with just about anybody in an open framework to add services. For large ISPs, which may have existing business relationships with value-added service providers, the SlipIn framework allows the ISPs to keep the relationships they have when they add SlipStream Data.

The cat is out of the bag
QuikCAT, which has a reputation for being particularly inexpensive, and which claims to use unique compression technology, appeared at ISPCON in the AASP booth.

QuikCAT was recently acquired by Burlingame, Calif.-basd venture fund IA Global.

Heading upstream through hyperspace
Greenwood Village, Colo.-based HyperSpace Communications remains focused on the enterprise space, but came to ISPCON offering a unique form of acceleration.

The company accelerates traffic at a lower level in the stack, says Michael Lynch, vice president of product management and business development, and its most popular application for ISPs is offering a point to point acceleration service that crams more traffic onto a single T-1, effectively providing multiple T-1 speed for a fraction of the cost.

Lynch even claims that some ISPs that use another accelerator for customers will deploy its HyperTunnel ISP or HyperTunnel Back-Haul service deeper in the network.

Your applications in one package
Irvine, Calif.-based Proxyconn is putting together a package of applications that includes acceleration, an ad blocker, spyware protection and removal, parental controls, system tools (resembling MS Config), privacy (user does not transmit IP or other data to remote servers), auto update, and "customer communication" allowing an ISP to deliver a popup ad or link to a user.

This customer communication feature solves a common ISP problem, says Uzi Yair, CEO of Proxyconn. He says that ISPs are unable to communicate with their customers through advertising or e-mail.

He is working on adding anti-spam and anti-virus to the package, and is working on partnering with a major parental control provider. At the moment, the parental control feature is a whitelist and blacklist that the end user builds individually. One interesting feature is that each time the parental control password is entered, a "control number" changes, so parents can tell when their children are using the password.

Yair says that since Proxyconn uses the browser cache, the accelerator cache is easy to clear. He adds that the client is just 1.1 MB, with most of the functionality residing on the server.

Middlebury, Conn.-based Artera Turbo is also present at ISPCON on the show floor, with its suite of services: ad blocking, firewall, and parental controls. The company is working with ISPs of all sizes, and is even talking to VARs the company met on the show floor.

The bottom line
The bottom line remains what we said at the top of this article. Competition is bad for them but good for you. With so many options available, it pays to test them all. Every acceleration provider is eager to participate in a test, because each claims to be the best. As an ISP, you should take advatage of this, and test these applications yourself.

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