NetEqualizer News Blog

Maybe I am old school, but when I go to a news site, I typically don’t want to watch videos of the news.  I want to skim the article text and move on. I find reading my news  to be a much more efficient way of filtering the content I am interested in.    The problem I have run into recently is that the text portion of news site portals loads much more slowly than a few years ago.  The text portions are starved for bandwidth while waiting for a video to load.  Considering text takes up very little bandwidth it should load very quickly, if not for that darn video!

Solution.

I can easily tune my NetEqualizer to throttle video, and leave text alone, thus I can get to reading the text without having to wait on the video to load.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but slowing a website video down does make the page load faster.

Here is a behind the scenes explanation of how the NetEq enhances the speed of some of the popular news sites when the stories are loaded with embedded video.

• Your browser typically attempts to load multiple elements of a webpage at one time.  So I can’t really blame the browser for the text delays. Both the video and text, along with other images, all load simultaneously from the browsers perspective.
• Video by its nature tries to buffer ahead when bandwidth is available.
• With my business grade 20 megabit Internet, the video buffering will dominate the entire 20 megabits.  The text loading, even though small with respect to data, tends to suffer in the wings when a video download is dominating the link.
• Why exactly the text loading does not get equal cycles to load I am not 100 percent sure, but people who design routers have told me that the persistent video connection once started is favored by the router over other packets.
• The  NetEqualizer by its own design punishes large streams by slowing them down when your link is at capacity.    This allows the text loading a nice chunk of bandwidth to work with and it loads much more quickly than when competing with the video stream.

For  more details on how this works we have a youtube that explains it all.