Double your internet speed

I hate slow Internet. I really hate it with a passion. Unfortunately, I do most of my work on dial up and GPRS modems. You know how slow dial up is? Well GPRS is a bit slower. Fortunately I have found a solution that can almost double my Internet download speed over GPRS and dial up. What is the magic tonic?


The magic tonic is an ssh tunnel. ssh is a secure shell protocol. It is a way to securely handle a remote connection to another computer. In a nutshell, it is an encrypted connection between two computers. Cool, that’s ssh, but what is an ssh tunnel? The ssh protocol allows just about any tcp/ip(Internet) packets to be transferred over the connection, a tunnel between the two computer if you will.

How does that almost double your Internet speed? Well, this ssh tunnel is encrypted but you also have the option to compress the data being sent as well. Typical web surfing packets are sent uncompressed to your computer but by compressing them, once you decompress them on your computer, you typically get double the data than if the data was not compressed. There is a trade off, decompressing and compressing packets on the fly does take CPU resources and theoretically some amount of time, but at dial up and GPRS speeds, CPU and time resources is not noticeable at all.

Sold? Time to set it up and that can be the hard part. Luckily, I have a VPS that allows me to set up a SQUID proxy server on internal port. It costs me $20 a month, but for $20 a month, I get web hosting for as many sites as I can manage, root access to my own server, and an awesome amount of storage and bandwidth. For me, the Internet speed up is free.

I installed a SQUID proxy server and the rest was easy. I use Ubuntu Linux on my home computer. The command for doing an ssh connection with compression was this easy:
ssh xx.xx.xxx.xxx -C -l username -L44444:127.0.0.1:9999

Just open up a terminal in Linux and type that command and you are set. What does it do?
- xx.xx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of your VPS
- username is whatever your ssh log-in is
- 44444 can be any number from 1025 to 65000, it is just the port number you want on your local computer.
- 9999 is the port number for your SQUID proxy server install

You can set up Firefox to use this quite easy by going into Preferences, Network and setting up a manual HTTP proxy server.
host: 127.0.0.1 Port: 44444

Once you got it up, it is a great thing. All of your data is encrypted AND compressed and you can finally surf on a connection that previously made you go crazy.