The software, it does nothing! Or does it?

March 28, 2009 7:36 PM

cFosSpeed internet accelerator: worth the fuss/money?

cFosSpeed claims to smooth/quicken your internet connection, particularly over such temperamental beasts as USB mobile 3G modems, which would be my intended use. Anyone has tried it? Does it work? Is the techincal basis for this thing sound or is it nonsense or worse?

posted by Iosephus to computers & internet (6 comments total)

reading the page it looks like it simply prioritizes traffic on a per-app basis which probably makes the preferred apps work better, but it's not going to make bandwidth appear by magic. Do you have multiple users and apps using this one 3G modem? If so, this might help. If not you probably want something that does compression and/or caching which requires support on the wired end of your internet connection and would need to be supplied by your ISP/carrier. Companies likeSlipStream developed this kind of thing for dialup users but some wireless data companies have adopted it as well since the problem is pretty much the same.
posted by GuyZero at 7:48 PM on March 28

cFosSpeed is a network driver, which attaches itself to existing Internet connections. It then optimizes data transfer by means of Traffic Shaping.

Basically it looks like this does QoS on your network traffic, and lets you give higher priority to specific programs. Maybe that will speed up specific programs, but it won't do anything with your overall speed/connection.

Typically, programs like this act as a proxy to give your computer a cached, faster copy of websites, but it doesn't look like it does that. The website also mentions a 2-hop ping that the program does to test network congestion, but it never says what it does with that data. In my opinion, it's not worth it.
posted by niles at 7:55 PM on March 28

Looks like GuyZero is right -- this may help increase apparent speed of your connection when you're doing multiple things at once, but is unlikely to do much to actually increase the speed of your connection. As they say themselves:

"First, keep in mind that tests with just one upload or download can only measure your connection's maximum up or downstream transfer rate. That is why you will need to generate at least two simultaneous data streams to gauge the effect of cFos Traffic Shaping."

So if you try to load a web page while you have a large download in the background, the software will slow down the download to make the page load faster for you. The overall speed of the pipe is still the same, you're just prioritizing its use more efficiently. Not snake oil, but not really an accelerator either. Of course, you can do the same thing yourself too: don't try to browse the web while you're downloading something.

They also seem to do some type of ACK filtering/prioritization. I am not a network engineer, but I find it hard to believe this has a particularly significant effect on speed. I'll let more informed posters comment on that.
posted by zachlipton at 7:56 PM on March 28

If it's just traffic-shaping, QoS, that kinda stuff, I believe there are free programs which do the same thing.
posted by box at 8:00 PM on March 28

I see... Instructive answers, thanks! As I'm not running many apps while connected and I'm the only user, it wouldn't smooth anything much for me then. The compression/caching is an interesting thought, but my ISP is way far from such smarts. When I travel around and luck out on some crappy slow coverage area I have used Onspeed, but as their servers are quite a way from me the improvement is minor. I'm lucky the 3G thing just works (ok, usually!), since it's my available internet for quite some time more. And yes, manual prioritizing would be just fine and has been until now. ;-)
posted by Iosephus at 8:17 PM on March 28

I've used cFosSpeed for years and I've been happy with it the entire time. On the extremely fast DSL connection I had in Japan it made a big difference in upload/download speeds. I think this was due to the modem having poor caching when the bandwidth was saturated. On the DSL I have now, I believe the bandwidth is artificially limited on the ISP level and cfos doesn't give me the same benefits as I had in Japan. Instead it does seem to speed up web browsing when I'm saturating my bandwidth by minimizing the latency (ping) of my connection.

I think you should try it out. There is a free trial after all. I'm not sure what benefits you will see with a 3G connection, but it could be a little of both decreased latency on prioritized connections and increased bandwidth from improved caching.
posted by robofunk at 11:21 AM on March 30