Favourite technology twist of the week comes from Santa Barbara, California router manufacturer Advanced Computer Communications Inc. Release 5.0 of the software for its Series 4000 boxes will feature Express Queueing, a way of automatically giving priority to interactive traffic travelling over a network at the expense of file transfer packets. While a slight slowdown in the speed of a file transfer worries few people, sub-second changes in response times are noticeable and irksome for real-time users. Advanced Computer’s answer is to examine packet size and give small packets priority. The net effect is that file transfers – which generate large packets – are pushed to the end of the queue. The simplicity of just examining packet size makes the technology is protocol-independent.
