Mentat has announced the availability of SkyX Gateway firmware version 4.0, incorporating Web Prefetch functionality for faster downloads of Web content over satellite links. Benchmark testing demonstrates that the use of the SkyX Gateway with Web Prefetch increases Web download speeds over satellite networks by up to 8 times.
Mentat’s SkyX Gateway, the leading Internet-over-satellite performance enhancement system, is a unique, award-winning product for overcoming the limitations of Internet Protocols when used over long-latency networks.
The SkyX Gateway combines multiple acceleration techniques including TCP-to-XTP protocol translation, Web Prefetch, and data compression to make possible terrestrial-like performance over satellite links. The SkyX Gateway accelerates e-mail, Web downloads, file transfers, and other TCP/IP applications while remaining entirely transparent to end users.
The new Web Prefetch functionality reduces download times by pro-actively retrieving graphics and other objects embedded in each Web page. Typical Web pages contain between 30 to 80 objects per page.
The SkyX Gateway on same side of the network as the Web server retrieves the embedded objects within each HTML page, then forwards them to the SkyX Gateway on the client side of the satellite link where they can be served locally when requested by the browser, thereby avoiding the satellite delay.
Benchmark testing on a simulated 1.5 Mbps satellite link demonstrated that SkyX enhancement improves the download speed of the Mentat web site by 8 times, reducing the average download time per page from 36.9 sec. to only
4. 6 sec. Over an unenhanced broadband terrestrial network, the same downloads average 9.0 sec. per page, making the satellite link with SkyX enhancement nearly twice as fast as an equivalent terrestrial network.
Additional benchmarking of the most popular Internet sites shows that for pages that allow prefetching, SkyX enhancement increases download speeds by an average of 4 times, with some sites showing gains of greater than 9 times.
“Current Web site design, with large numbers of objects embedded on each page, leads to slow downloads over satellite links,” said Kay Guyer, Mentat President.
“As more and more communications transition to Web-based interfaces, Web Prefetch and other HTTP-specific enhancements that we have added to the SkyX Gateway are becoming as important to our customers as our traditional data compression and TCP layer enhancements.”
Version 4.0 is available free of charge to SkyX Gateway users. Existing customers can download the firwmware update from Mentat.
