The amount of repetition will dictate how well the device can adapt to flows. Internet traffic is usually more random than something such as SNA or enterprise resource planning data. For example, Internet traffic data can be going to any one of millions of IP addresses and typically contains things such as JPEGs or GIFs that are already compressed. They intercept packets, accelerate them and pass them across a leased line to the far site's Accelerator, where the packets are decompressed and sent to the far-end router. The only trick is making sure that clock rates on routers are increased to speed the passing of data to the Accelerators.
Administration takes place from a command line or through a Web browser.
The command line nicely mimics Cisco's Internet Operating System. The Web interface isn't flashy, but it works well. Because the Accelerator is an external unit, it doesn't burden a router's CPUs, but it adds some latency. In tests, we observed 5 to 7 milliseconds of extra delay. This makes the Accelerator a poor choice for delay-sensitive traffic such as voice over IP or videoconferencing.