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[Vanburen]

I run a couple of websites, through which I have come across a company called Cloudflare. Who are bascially a CDN with some added extras.

Recently, they have developed a technology for optimising the connection between the client web server and their CDN servers, called Railgun:
https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun 

This acts to optimise the connection between the two servers, which supposedly "achieves a 99.6% compression ratio for previously uncacheable web objects". I have noticed an improvement on my own sites, as they are hosted in the US, so the loading time in the UK has definitely improved.

I was just wondering, if you guys thought something similar could be used to optimise slow ADSL connections?

I'd imagine it would work, by having a proxy running on the users network, which would then connect to a server on the ISP network. The connection between which would be running on something similar to Railgun.

I guess this would be more of a benefit to people on really slow connections (i.e. below 2000kbps).

[roseway]

I've no experience of such systems, but my inclination is to be very suspicious of their claims. I think that your first actions should be to make sure your own setup is as good as it can be, and secondly to investigate the possibility of local interference.

[JGO]

This acts to optimise the connection between the two servers, which supposedly "achieves a 99.6% compression ratio for previously uncacheable web objects". I have noticed an improvement on my own sites, as they are hosted in the US, so the loading time in the UK has definitely improved.

I'm not clear what this means. Sending the same data in 99.6% of the time wouldn't be noticeable so, as you did notice it,  that isn't what it means.  Compression usually means avoiding inefficient data transmissions, like letting N people type into the same computer by storing key strokes and sending data continuously even though any particular terminal is say 90% idle. AIUI there has to be some redundancy in the data either gaps or duplication of essentially similar data,  to permit compression. A .ZIP file  can compress text appreciably because there is 40% redundency in English, but  expands an .EXE file with no redundancy, due to the compression overhead.

Thus I suspect this technique is exploiting some unique feature of the files transmitted, which is fine but not universally applicable.   One could compress ADSL by sending all the day's downloads continuously for 1 hour at the end of the day without normal thinking time and letting 23 others use the circuit for rest of the time, but most humans don't work like that !