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Advanced PPP features from the dial-up days still live?

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Weaver:
In the days of dial-up modems, some ISPs, Demon being an outstanding example, offered all the fancy features that the PPP protocol suite provides, including header compression for IP and TCP headers to more or less make them go away, very powerful data compression too.

* I wonder if any of this goodness has survived into the modern era?

* Do any ISPs have kit powerful enough to do the sexy things we used to enjoy?

* Would this be constrained by any need to remain within the boundaries of what BT can understand?

IPv6 header compression - yum, yes please. And TCP header compression, still relevant.

Obviously the ISP is hardly going to be motivated if no CPE is available that can handle this yummy goodness at the user's end.

I noticed that our cheerful Scot from BT - speaking at a recent UKNOF iirc, his name has just gone - mentioned how they would like to get rid of PPP and do IPoE.

Who ordered that? Yet more bloat from the arguably useless Ethernet headers, but I can see the attraction for multiplexing and getting strange functions via VLANs that caould make ISPs money from non-Internet services (and start to get up to all kinds of disturbing tricks too which may be hard for us the users to monitor and control). And more chaos and wasted money in the transition too.

GigabitEthernet:
I very much like your curiosity! ;D

Unfortunately on this occasion I cannot be of much assistance, other than to say I will be watching this thread with a keen interest ;)

Weaver:
I have failed in my attempts to google this subject, its the time/era thing that Google doesn't seem to be capable of understanding.

Chrysalis:
the problem is these days compression at the network level now has more limited benefits, because things like gzip compression on http pages e.g. is now the norm.

As for your curiousity tho I can give you some stats in regards to network level compression the next time I enable my VPN to watch a game, it does get reasonably impressive compression levels.

However I expect if isp's were to do this network wide there would be massive cpu usage across the board.

Weaver:
> massive cpu usage

and a lot of totally incompressible data too. Email and html aren't significant in term of the fraction of bandwidth they represent out of the total.

But crazy CPUs should be able to do things such as header compression, Moore's law and multicore can take care of the stresses placed upon these nodes surely.

I'd be interested to know how important very short messages are. VoIP is short? DNS queries (not enough of them). Very short IP packets over IPv6 might be candidates for a big percentage decrease in size? I'm not sure.

What's a high rate, short packet protocol?

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