Technology company boosts 3G performance to 5G speeds

As is the case with millions of remote workers, I rely on my 3G network card for network connectivity when I travel with my laptop away from the office.  I would probably be considered by many as an extreme road warrior as I spend up to 50% or more of my time traveling to customer locations, marketing events, and speaking opportunities throughout the US and around the globe.  My 3G connection is my lifeline when I am away of the office and need to access my email, need to work from my company's corporate intranet, or when I need to grab the latest office documents or creative assets from one of the central file servers.  While 3G provides the remote connectivity I need, there is one little problem...

It is way too slow!

You might be thinking to yourself what is the problem?  After all 3G is a major upgrade to yesterday's 2.5G or edge carrier networks and going from a 2.5G-enabled iPhone to an iPhone 3G really improved the performance of key applications like downloading web pages.  While cell phone environments surely benefit from the performance boost of 3G, laptop users that need to connect back into their corporate infrastructure get very little boost from 3G.  The problem isn't the 3G connection specifically, but more a combination of the fact that the unreliable connectivity combined with the high latency of the connection combined with the inefficiency of the protocols and applications results in a 3G connection that is 30 to 100 times slower compared to if you were sitting in the office and accessing your email and applications locally. 

I know that's a lot of variables to consider and can be confusing so I'll try to simplify things.  When you connect over a cellular network, the connection takes place using cellular towers.  This process introduces very high round trip time (RTT) latency, which is the time it takes for a packet of data to go from the sender to the receiver and back again.  On your corporate LAN, the RTT latency is often less than 1ms RTT.  If you are on 802.11 wireless in the office, your latency could be as high as 5ms RTT.  Contrast that to a cellular connection where latency is often in excess of 200ms RTT and in many cases even much higher.  Every round trip taken by the application whether its email, file sharing, or accessing that corporate intranet, can take 200ms with a 3G network.  If you do the math, every 5 round trips takes a second.  Multiply by how many round trips the application has to take and in the case of file sharing, email, or your web-based corporate intranet, a single operation like downloading a 5MB document can require several hundred round trips.  What took just 2 seconds to open while you were in the office, now takes minutes over your 3G connection.  All activities whether its browsing folders, moving between web pages, or syncing your email all suffer from this latency phenomenon.  Talk about a productivity killer!

The next generation cellular network technology, 4G, looks promising with somewhat improved latency and a higher throughput performance for downloads and uploads.  While 4G specs have documented latency being reduced down to 50ms RTT from 200ms RTT,  corporate applications will still suffer from the impact that 50ms RTT imposes.  What is needed is something beyond even 4G improvements.

Luckily, there is a solution available today thanks to the groundbreaking work that Dr. Steve McCanne, co-founder and CTO at Riverbed technology came up with.  Riverbed's Steelhead Mobile WAN optimization software is deployed on laptops or home worker's PCs and a Steelhead appliance is deployed where the servers and applications reside at the data center.  Both the Steelhead Mobile software and the Steelhead appliance work together to reduce the redundant traffic in addition to reducing the amount of application and protocol chatter.  The result is less data is sent over the network and fewer transactions take place.  The high latency impact is mitigated and performance is dramatically improved by up to 100 times in some cases.  Operations that once took minutes over the slow 3G connection, now take seconds.

So road warriors around the world rejoice!  Take your laptop, 3G card, and Steelhead Mobile software with you and be more productive without the pain associated with that slow, remote 3G connection.  Its like turning that 3G connection into a 5G connection.

For more information about Steelhead Mobile, visit http://www.riverbed.com/products/steelhead_mobile/

Bob Gilbert
Director of Marketing
Riverbed Technology
From my Steelhead Mobile optimized connection running at 5G speeds

Comments

[John Pascual (RCSP)]

This is great stuff. With rapid growth of cloud computing plus the Google Chrome OS coming out, it's evident that acceleration for mobile users (using netbooks or smartphones) is becoming more of a necessity than just a preference.

[ambience]

Thanks for this well compiled info. I live in South Africa and 3G speeds are extremely fast and reliable here (based on my experience). I am not sure if 5G is HSDPA, but with HSDPA I can get well over 1mbps.

Info by me: Laptop Wireless Internet Card

[ClubPenguinCheats]

Over the years its we have been using these standards for all our downloading and uploading needs.