Technical Details

Enigma Net. TCP acceleration is designed to mitigate the performance issues latency and packet loss that impact upon both general internet use and application performance and delivery. Enigma Net. has the ability to support any public or private Cloud application deployment globally.

How, then, does the technology work? Essentially by removing the inefficiencies in the TCP protocol responsible for determining the amount of bandwidth in a single user session, and managing window sizes regardless of latency conditions and packet loss. In this way, performance is both optimised and consistent with our claim of up to 20x improvement in bandwidth usage and performance.

From a security perspective, Enigma Net. replaces the need to create additional overhead in the form of an encrypted tunnel, such as when using IP Sec. In addition to removing a layer of complexity, it also removes the performance hit associated with traditional encryption technologies which has often been measured at up to 50% overhead.

Viewed from an Enigma Net. perspective, generic TCP acceleration applies to all TCP traffic (that being most network-based traffic) without needing to be aware of the application or information contained within it. Enigma Net. TCP Acceleration (TCPA) will accelerate all such traffic significantly, whether encrypted or not, but especially in certain, common circumstances, such as:

Where many small items are transferred, common to almost all web traffic. Any packet loss is present, as is the case at some point in almost all Internet connections and especially so in the “new normal” with bandwidth contention becoming increasingly common as traffic is ever-increasing. When multiple, mixed traffic transfers are taking place simultaneously, again as is the case on most Internet links.

As latency increases – Enigma Net. makes a noticeable difference even at lower latencies, but the positive effect increases as latency itself increases.

Where there are what we might call “long fat pipes” – i.e. when bandwidth times latency is a high value. Examples of this scenario are fast international connections (whether private circuit or Internet-based) and bonded connections, with multiple, aggregated links.

Web browsing speed is further increased because of the fact that the user experiences connections to the server much more quickly than they would otherwise (and so can send the initial request far more quickly). From a user perspective this happens in the order of a few milliseconds, rather than experiencing the entire latency of the link to the server.

This so-called “new normal” of constant internet uses presents significant problems for business users of the Internet, as what is already an often oversubscribed network becomes ever more saturated, not least due to the migration to cloud based computing.

Traffic optimisation has been around for decades, but much of what has been developed to date, thanks to the large-scale deployment of encrypted connections, is increasingly irrelevant. With its TCP acceleration technology, Enigma Net. has a solution to this problem, as it can accelerate TCP traffic, whether encrypted or not. As before, from a security efficiency perspective, Enigma Net replaces the need to create additional overhead in the form of an encrypted tunnel.

Our acceleration applies to all TCP traffic – that being most network-based traffic – without needing to be aware of the application or information contained within it. This means general browsing, as well as file downloads and other TCP-related activity is all optimised, resulting in a significant overall user experience improvement at all times. We claim up to 20x acceleration, but independent tests recorded acceleration levels of up to 64x and even these results could be significantly improved upon by testing in more challenging Internet connectivity conditions. In combination with our patented VoIP optimisation, we offer a unique offering in the world of Internet optimisation, supporting both traditional optimisation and redundancy methods, but equally designed to optimise the “new normal” world of connectivity, securely and regardless of the network type, so it is completely flexible and scalable.

A note on Speed Test websites

Many people use the free Speedtest websites in order to obtain Internet performance figures, especially after new installations, but it is important to understand the fundamental limitations of how these sites work.

Put simply, they don’t normally take into account the effects of latency or packet loss; the former especially is prevalent to some extent when running anywhere near capacity or – as is common – when oversubscribed. Even good links will have the odd spike in latency when they’re over capacity or suffer occasional packet loss. These will greatly affect file transfer speeds but won’t necessarily show in speed test results.

We ran a sample test, over a link at 100Mbps with a dialled in 0.5% packet loss. The Speedtest website claimed a downlink speed of over 30Mbps, but comparing back to back with real download tests, the actual throughput was only 10% of that being claimed by the Speedtest site. This might explain why carriers and ISPs are keen to encourage the use of Speed test sites.