The Need for Data Compression

• At any given time, the ability of the Internet to transfer data is fixed.
• Think of the capability as the Internet's collective bandwidth.
• Thus, if data can effectively be compressed wherever possible, significants improvements of data throughput can be achieved.
• In some instances, file sizes can be reduced by up to 60-70 %.
• At the same time, many systems cannot accommodate purely binary data, so encoding schemes are also employed which reduce data compression effectiveness.
• Many files can be combined into one compressed document making sending easier, provided combined file size is not huge.