Save Network Bandwidth

Saving network bandwidth is important for those users who are subscribed to a data plan that gives them a certain amount of Gigabytes per month that they can transfer freely. If they reach the limit they either have to pay for additional data transfers or live with reduced connection speeds which are both unpleasant side effects. Another possibility would be specialized services where the user has to pay for every data transfer right from the beginning.

The rise of mobile phones, netbooks and other mobile devices pushed the need for data compression tools that reduce the actual size of a data transfer.

Toonel (via Make Use Of) provides a solution both for desktop computer users as well as those that connect with a mobile device to the Internet. It features an impressive list of operating system it is compatible with including Windows, Linux, Macintosh, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

All versions basically function the same way. The traffic is routed through the Toonel servers which compress the communication with the user’s computer system. The user will have to set a proxy address in his favorite web browser or application so that the traffic will be compressed by the local client before it is being send to the Toonel server and from there to the destination address.

Toonel works with http, https, ftp connections and virtually any other form of TCP / IP connections. One interesting feature is to control the quality level of images which can greatly reduce the bandwidth needed to transfer the data. Users who want to save as much as possible might want to consider turning image browsing off in their application.