Mobile Broadband/image Quality

[martinproll]

Hi all. I have just purchased mobile broadband with Vodafone. Excellent, speedy downloads and surfing, etc. Just one thing - Since I started browsing with my vodafone USB stick, the image quality on web pages has gone crazy. For example, thumbnails on Facebook are just little squares of smudge! What can I do? An incompatabilty issue? My laptop is running on Vista. Thank you. Martin.

[armouredant]

There's a lovely little company based in Texas that have made a little Mac OS widget that will circumvent image compression on Mobile Broadband services; it's free, and you can download it here (it's called ByteMe Optimizer):

http://aitne.com

Took a bit of finding, but it works a treat. Close the app when you want to switch back to compressed images. Hope this helps!

Admins, please recommend this to anyone who asks about compression on a Mac. Ta!

[WhyVoda]

Im having a slightly more annoying problem which is actually affecting my business!! I run a gallery and I try to update my online stock from work (which requires uploading via ftp)... Quite often the transfer mode is changed (I think) and the resulting file takes the full time to upload, but when i look at it on the server it is 1 byte or thereabouts.... works fine on my wifi at home...

I have tried different ftp clients and i do know what i am doing on this front... Another confusion i am having is this... a few weeks ago i turned off my software compression and a few other bits and bobs on my DU connection (not using VMC)... the problem of image compression and my upload problems were solved hooray!!! now, about two weeks later, im back to square one and have changed nothing...

Is this vodafone detecting some change in my network usage and applying some kind of compression to maintain qos?

Also, large emails are very problematic (when i say large, i mean 1mb plus, which isnt actually that large!!) and 99% of the time, outlook fails to send...

So effectively, most users who have mobile broadband have poor image quality when browsing, cant send largeish emails and are unable to upload? Sounds like a great service!! Sort it out Vodafone...

[Neil_Brown]

Compression could affect image upload via FTP, I believe. However, have you tried switching to SFTP instead? The encryption wrapper *should* prevent the compression from mangling your images?

Similarly, which mail server are you using? Your own one, or a vodafone.net server?

[Retired-Jon_V]

Hi WhyVoda,

The mail system is being completely replaced in the next few months, so the attachment issue will be a thing of the past. At the moment we're unable to resolve it as the system in use is no longer supported by the hardware vendor - hence the planned overhaul. In the meantime, where possible, we recommend that you use third-party SMTP systems or preferably your own SMTP domains.

The FTP issue is one which I've been crop up before and is due to compression on half of our IP ranges. We are in the process of removing network-level optimisation for all broadband connections, but in the meantime simply keep an eye on your IP address, and if you experience this problem, disconnect and reconnect until you connect on a different IP range.

Any IP address where the third octet is below 64 will be optimised. Anything above this is un-optimised.
For example, the address 10.46.60.xx will be optimised.
10.46.70.xx will be un-optimised.

I trust this helps

Jon

eForum Team

[tmx]

Theres a work around to this if you can get access to a Windows machine install the byteclient & VMC on a windows machine change the setting when connected on Bytemobile to No optimisation then turn it off!!!

[techmind]

The FTP issue is one which I've been crop up before and is due to compression on half of our IP ranges. We are in the process of removing network-level optimisation for all broadband connections, but in the meantime simply keep an eye on your IP address, and if you experience this problem, disconnect and reconnect until you connect on a different IP range.

Any IP address where the third octet is below 64 will be optimised. Anything above this is un-optimised.
For example, the address 10.46.60.xx will be optimised.
10.46.70.xx will be un-optimised.

I wonder whether this is relevant to our http 503 / 504 errors and slow page loading on the other thread... will check.
Can you quote the same info on that thread please, Jon.

[techmind]

I'm not convinced about the accuracy of the above IP address-range / compression information.

I'm currently connected with the IP of 10.46.66.172 and the images are definitely compressed, and improve with a ctrl+F5 refresh.
(I cleared the IE cache and everything so resuls should be valid)

[Neil_Brown]

I thought Vodafone blocked all SMTP (port-25) connections other than to their own servers (an anti-spam measure)...?

No - not blocked, at least in my experience.

[Retired-Daz_V]

Hi techmind,

Just to let you know we don't block that port range, so this won't be an issue.

If you have any questions on this, please let us know!

In completely unrelated other news, if you’re planning to go away this summer (it's raining today here ), you really owe it to yourself to check out our Summer Roaming Promotion! It’s so good that it’s almost an excuse to get away!


Daz

eForum Team