Hyper Pipe promises more data throughput

People are getting excited about pulling fiber optic cable to the home. Verizon is spending megabucks rolling out its FiOS network in select cities. Many folks believe fiber cable will solve the nearly mythical "last mile" bandwidth bottleneck service providers face.

While not deriding the benefits of upgrading a service provider's infrastructure, Bob MacIntyre, vice president of business development and marketing for Maple Gove, Minn.-based Network Executive Software Inc., which does business as NetEx, thinks ISPs might consider a simple protocol swamp instead. That is, run the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) instead of TCP.

He claims because NetEx's Hyper Pipe software, now in beta at one unnamed ISP, uses UDP it is able to deliver up to 90% "effective data throughput." TCP, notorious for retransmissions, achieves only a fraction of UDP, MacIntyre contends.

TCP's insistence on connection quality is its Achilles heel when it comes to modern demands on the Internet. The perceived bottleneck among the vast majority of home users happens because TCP retransmits so many packets during file downloads or while streaming video. But that's when UDP excels, MacIntyre says.

"You may lose a pixel or two, but UDP keeps going," he says.

Hyper Pipe will be out of beta later this summer. NetEx is looking for ISPs that want to try fixing the last-mile problem with a software pipe, not a fiber optic one.