How Effective is cFosSpeed Traffic Shaping?

We have published a cFosSpeed Traffic Shaping Report  to test and show how effective cFosSpeed Traffic Shaping is.

The effect of cFosSpeed Traffic Shaping was tested on a VDSL-100 connection by measuring ping times while an upload or a download, respectively, were running. The average times with and without cFosSpeed were compared and lead to the conclusion that cFosSpeed Traffic Shaping can keep the delay from data transfers 3 to 10 times lower than without.

Introduction

Traffic Shaping is a technique to reorder Internet data packets in such a way that urgent traffic is transferred first and the rest of the data later. For example, data packets of a VoIP application should be transferred quicker (i.e., with less latency) than packets of an up- or download. Usually, it’s not important if the down- load is ready 1 second earlier or later, whereas a VoIP connection with a delay of 0.5 seconds is almost unusable.

To that end, cFosSpeed was created. It is a software for the Windows operating system and is in widespread use since 2004. There exist some other programs that
have a built-in capability to reduce their data band width so as not to interfere with other applications, but cFosSpeed is the only fully automatic software solution in the market today that can be used for all programs on Windows.

This report assesses how well cFosSpeed works in today’s Internet with a modern, fast Internet connection. One could think that modern Internet connections with their high bandwidth have made cFosSpeed superfluous. We will show that this is not the case. Even though the authors work for cFos Software GmbH that develops and sells cFosSpeed, we aim at maximum clarity in this report. You should be able to reproduce all the effects at home, so we provide a lot of detaill

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Conclusion

We took ping times while a download respectively an upload was in progress. We compared times taken with and without cFosSpeed Traffic Shaping on a VDSL-100 connection (109341 kbit/s down, 40143 kbit/s up).

cFosSpeed Traffic Shaping could lower the ping times considerably. When downloading, cFosSpeed kept the additional delay 3.2 times lower. When uploading, the delay was even 9.8 times less!

This means that even today with high-speed Internet connections, cFosSpeed can greatly help to keep the delay that transfers impose low. This can help in cases where low ping times are essential, like when using VoIP or terminal sessions, playing online games, etc.


+++ You can read the full PDF-report here http://www.cfos.de/files/cFosSpeed-Traffic-Shaping-report.pdf +++