My latest discovery is a small program that is a really gem.
cFosSpeed, installs some new drivers in your PC giving you the ability to surf smooth even you are downloading in background tons of files ;-)
Using some "special" technics [like Traffic Shaping], cFosSpeed prioritize the data packets with a way that gives you full access to your broadband bandwidth.


cFos Traffic Shaping reduces delays during data transfer and allows you to surf the Internet up to three times faster. So you can use the full bandwidth of your connection!


During TCP/IP transfer, a certain amount of data needs to be confirmed upon reception before more can be sent. Stalling data confirmation results in delays and transfer-rate slowdowns, thus forcing the sender to wait. Especially for DSL and cable, it is possible to slow a download to a crawl by choking the upstream channel (which has the smaller bandwidth anyway) with an upload. This is because in such a scenario there is not enough upstream bandwidth left for data confirmation.


The standard solution so far has been to try and compensate for this by increasing TCP window size, thereby allowing more data to be sent without immediate confirmation. The main problem here is that this also leads to high ping times (latency) and significant delays during Webpage rendering. Latency of up to 2 seconds is not uncommon for TCP windows with a size of 64k. In short, huge window sizes just won´t let you achieve full download speed.


By contrast, cFos Traffic Shaping prioritizes data traffic in such a fashion that important packets zip past regular packets. This way, receipts always arrive in time, and uploads won't ever choke your broadband connection again!


cFos Traffic-Shaping technology recognizes a number of important packet types and prioritizes them not only to keep Internet traffic running smoothly but also to ensure particularly low ping times. This not only accelerates surfing and download speeds significantly, but it is also a decisive advantage for online gaming.


With cFos Traffic Shaping, you will notice measurable improvements and benefits like:
* Full download rate during upload
* Consistently quick response time while surfing the Web or running other applications
* Improved VoIP speech quality


Without Traffic Shaping, ping times can easily reach a horrific 2 seconds, which will make participating in Telnet or SSH sessions a chore – if not outright impossible. But with cFos Traffic Shaping, latency remains normal.


This alone should make for a totally new surfing experience!


It also means that while surfing the Web, you will be hard-pressed to even notice that there are any data transfers running in the background. Again, such drastically reduced latency will come in especially handy for online gaming.


First, cFos Traffic Shaping measures upstream and downstream rates as well as ping delays for each Internet connection. It then uses this information to control the scheduling of all Internet data transfer. In addition, Traffic Shaping does assign the available bandwidth dynamically to each individual connection as needed.


Not only does cFos Traffic Shaping prioritize ACKs, but also other important packets like those used for Telnet and SSH. Thus, with cFos Traffic Shaping, filesharing programs or mail uploads choking your connection will finally be a thing of the past!


Besides prioritizing ACK packets, Traffic Shaping performs or lets you perform the following:
RX Shaping
ensures ping times remain low even during downloads, while keeping one download from choking other simultaneous downloads.
ACK-Filter
optimizes TCP/IP acknowledgements, thus making more bandwidth available in the upstream channel.
Prioritizing individual programs
like games while assigning lower priority to others is especially useful when trying to reserve some extra bandwidth for important applications.
Voice over IP (VoiP) speech quality
is improved by recognition and prioritization of RTP packets.
Prioritizing other protocols through layer-7 analysis,
like HTTP, FTP, POP3, SMTP, ICMP, SSH, Telnet, and DNS can be done using built-in, programmable filtering rules.


Test it on your own!
I'm sure that you will see the benefit from the first second ;-)