Growth in Mobile Handsets Fuels Propel Software’s Entrance to the Market

Our partner, Propel, has just unveiled a new acceleration technology specifically designed for Internet-enabled mobile handsets such as smart phones and PDAs. Propel is offering a preview of the new Propel Accelerator for mobile devices, which is built on the same infrastructure as the company’s award-winning Propel Accelerator, at ISPCON. It will be available to demo to wireless carriers at the Propel booth. The platform will accelerate both graphics and text.

"The demand for mobile Internet access is growing steadily, so this is a natural evolution of our technology and our business", said David Murray, co-founder, president and chief operating officer of Propel. "Now wireless carriers around the world can use Propel and Netfury Accelerators to offer their customers reliable, fast Internet access no matter what device they’re using or where they are. All that adds up to happy customers and reduced churn, which are magic words in the extremely competitive global wireless market."

The growth of mobile handsets

According to recent Gartner reports, demand for smart phones and PDAs continue to grow. Smart phone sales grew 50 percent in the last quarter of 2006 to 73.9 million units. Gartner defines a smart phone as "a large-screen, voice-centric handheld device designed to offer complete phone functions while simultaneously functioning as a personal digital assistant."

Netfury is proud to have the UK distribution of Propel’s flagship product, Propel Accelerator, an award-winning Internet acceleration product that provides an optimised experience for users of 802.11 hotspots, wireless mobile data, low-speed broadband and dial-up connections. It is currently deployed by hundreds of ISPs and other Netfury users in more than 75 countries, making available an improved Internet experience to more than 34 million subscribers.

The latest version of Netfury Accelerator is proven to load pages three to seven times faster, and can sometimes load 25 times faster or more, while delivering near-original final image quality.*

So what’s new in 6.1?

Improved Compression: Netfury’s dramatic compression improvements for HTTP and POP3 uploads/downloads take acceleration to new levels of performance. The compressed data allows wireless broadband providers to support more subscribers on their networks, and it also benefits wired providers by enhancing network throughput and efficiency.

Connection Optimisation: Netfury has tuned its connection optimisation for greater performance on high speed and wireless connections, while maintaining performance for dial-up and lower speed customers.

Improved Mozilla Firefox Support: Netfury Accelerator 6.1 eliminates the need for users to manually change the proxy settings in Firefox. In addition, Firefox users can now view the original quality, uncompressed images through the right-click menu, a feature previously only available in Internet Explorer.

Dynamic Imaging: Dynamic Imaging enables browsers to quickly build usable versions of Web pages by first loading lower-quality preview images and then filling in details as they become available. This results in a much faster, improved browsing experience.

Enhanced Vista Compatibility: Vista users now enjoy enhanced compatibility with Netfury Accelerator 6.1.   

* Results vary depending on where and how you surf.