[COLUG] Satellite Web Proxy

[Mark Erbaugh]

I use a satellite ISP (Hughes Net). DSL and cable are unavailable.

One of the problems I have is that due to the time it takes the signal
to get to and from the satellite, sometimes relatively small web pages
take a long time to load.  Here's what I think is going on.

A trip from my computer to the Hughes Net earth station takes about 1/4
second (assuming radio travels 186,000 miles per second and the
satellite's orbit is 22,500 miles).

My web browser (Firefox on Ubuntu Dapper) requests a page.

1/4 second travel delay.

Hughes Net gets the page (assume no time) and sends it to me.

1/4 second travel delay.

My web browser notices that the page has an embedded item from another
location and requests that.

1/4 second travel delay

Hughs Net gets the requested item and sends it to me.

1/4 second travel delay

On many commercial sites, an embedded item may in turn have another
embedded item so the 1/2 delay repeats.  As an example, I went to the
AT&T website and watched as it jumped back and forth between items from
the AT&T website and the SBC website.  Pages took 30 seconds to load.  I
suspect that without the satellite latency, the average user (high speed
or even dial up) wouldn't have noticed all the jumping back and forth.

Any way, I had an idea. I could run a program on a machine I use for web
hosting. I could send a request to the program on that machine. That
program could request all the pieces of the web page, bundle them
together and then send the whole thing back to me in one chunk. That way
there would be only one trip up and back to the satellite.

Hughes Net offers something called Turbo Page, and I suspect that that
is doing something similar, but it may not be working because I'm not
using Windows and IE.

Would something like this work?

TIA,
Mark