PALO ALTO - Start-up service provider Netli promises to improve the Internet speeds of corporate Web applications without making changes to the applications and without adding software to the remote computers making Web connections.

Called NetLightning, the service reduces the delay that Internet traffic suffers when it crosses long distances.

This reduction is important with e-commerce pages in which potential customers leave a site if it takes too long to reach the resources they want. Netli says it pushes Internet delay below 1 second regardless of where Web servers and the computers accessing them are located.

Medical equipment vendor Millipore says using Netli's service reduced download times for its customers in Japan by more than 50% on average, says Jeff O'Halloran, manager of Internet services for the company. The most dramatic drop was from 7 seconds to 1.7 seconds in the time it took users in Tokyo to receive Millipore's home page, which originates in Bedford, Mass., he says.

To set up NetLightning, users redirect incoming Web-server traffic to a Netli point of presence, and the service provider takes care of the rest. For Millipore, those administrative changes took about 15 minutes, O'Halloran says. Netli sets up virtual Layer 4 trunks between the POP nearest the server and the POP nearest the requesting computer, basing the trunk on Netli's proprietary replacement for TCP called Netli Protocol.

Netli Protocol over IP uses fewer connections than TCP/IP to access the same Web data. Netli claims, for example, that the protocol can reduce from 31 to two the number of round-trip interactions needed to send a 70K byte Web page with 25 objects on it.

Netli Protocol also eliminates the slow-start feature of TCP that builds up the rate at which data is transferred gradually before reaching top speed. These and other refinements of TCP reduce the time it takes to download pages and to interact with Web applications, says Netli CEO John Peters.

While TCP/IP is still used to connect Web servers and remote computers to Netli POPs, the traffic travels a relatively small distance to reach these POPs and introduces little delay relative to the delay incurred when traffic crosses vast reaches of the Internet, Peters says. POP-to-POP tunneling improves response time so applications time-out less often.