we aren't going to look into compression until we have the basic methodology of our netcode complete.. and at that point compression probably wont be an option, considering the packet sizes are small to begin with..
as far as "whitespace" goes im not sure i follow... whitespace meaning the space character?? that may appear only in chat data, and as far as netcode goes, its not really an issue, as its not occuring every 50ms...
As for redundant data, i'd check your peeking again all that data is raw binary data, and its all relative to gameplay
Kent