We were having radio troubles and the cheapest short term fix was to get a satellite phone. When I first using it I thought there was something wrong because the data rates weren't what near what the slick brochure claimed.
David peered into the guts of these satellite connection optimizing applications to see if there was something that we were missing in the initialization commands (
AT &F E0 V1 &D2 &C1 W2 S95=47 S0=0 +cbst=71,0,1,e.g.); the commands that set the parameters for the connection.
There were slight variation, more for the type of telephone, but none that improve the speed.
When I arrived is Australia I contacted the original author of the WvDial script we use in Navigatrix. He uses satellite phones to transmit data from un-attended monitoring sites scattered around Antarctica. Every site has a phone that automagically calls up and dumps the data into his computers. I figured he would know.
I asked him about his experience and why my connection were so slow. He said, "No, that's about normal."
Your connection is about normal. The sales material is a bit misleading...not that it is intentionally misleading, but it is best-of-all-possible-worlds optimistic, and frequently given in
bits/second and you're seeing the
bytes/second. It's the same speed, but 1/8th the number.
The compression that some outfits are offering is the data is zipped into compressed chunks> transmitted> un-packed by software on your end. So rather than getting the plain text for an email your are receiving email5446565efcaee.zip The software keeps track of the details (downloaded or not; deleted or not; to big to send or not; number in the mailbox peaking order; etc.) and then transparently unpacks the data and displays it. Good gains can be made here. It just depends on individual use whether it's worth the price of admission.
They provide other 'compression' features on the fly such as stripping unneccessary data; optimizing or reducing images in size or pixel depth; or using a process called WAN Optimization. This removes the overhead and redundacy of the internet TCP/IP protocol...basically the packaging material, (boxes, lables, acknowledgement, styrofoam peanuts) that surround each packet of data.
The GRIB files you pick up with ZyGrib are about as compress as they can be, aside from the TCP/IP (internet) overhead. Using a similar stratigy the GRIBS are package in
.bz2 archives transmitted/store and ZyGrib unpacks them on the fly.
I did look into setting up a WAN Optimized server so Navigatrix users could dial in to have the same service, but the project was shelved because of time, talent and money...isn't that the way it always goes.
