Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

Your company's Web site is a work of art. Heck, the designer's fee was more than the GNP of some small countries. But take a moment to think of your customers: If you've ever been surfing the Web on the wrong end of a 14.4-Kbps or 28.8-Kbps modem, you know the agony of trying to access image-rich sites at low speeds. But there is a painkiller, and it can increase dramatically the rate at which users with restrictive bandwidth can browse your site.

We took five solutions that offer the promise of an accelerated Web browsing experience and put them to the test in our Green Bay, Wis., Real-World Labs®. We discovered that, while there are varying methods of achieving dramatic performance increases, all the solutions provided at least modest improvements in file transfers in our 14.4-Kbps simulated environment.

Top honors go to Packeteer's AppCelera ICX-75s, which provided respectable reductions in transfer times combined with a reliable, zero-point-of-failure appliance and an easy-to-use configuration and management system -- all for a great price. Runner-up BoostWorks' BoostWeb software offered excellent performance with a CPU-based pricing model and great OS support. Redline Networks' TX 2100 is an easy-to-deploy and -manage appliance that boosted performance on both the server and client sides but was held back by its inability to transform images.