In terms of storage, the capacity of a storage device can be effectively increased
with methods that compress a body of data on its way to a storage device and
decompresses it when it is retrieved. In terms of communications, the bandwidth
of a digital communication link can be effectively increased by compressed data
at the sending end and decompressing data at the receiving end. At any given
time, the ability of the Internet to transfer data is fixed. Thus, if data can
effectively be compressed wherever possible, significant improvements of data
throughput can be achieved. Many files can be combined into one compressed
document making sending easier.
