STAC compresses the data stream, prior to
transmission. You can read about it in
RFC 1974 and RFC 1967.
Stac is more CPU intensive than predictor, and
it's better at compression for slow speed
links (lines at less than T1 speeds); if your
link is fast (1 or 2Mbs), Predictor starts to
outperform Stac. There have been compression
bugs in the past, so you should ensure that
you are running recent code.