Tech: OnSpeed, any experience with this?

Subject: Tech: OnSpeed, any experience with this?
From: Bassic
Date: 21 Jan 04 - 08:18 AM

This has now been around for a few weeks, it claims to boost the speed of a "dialup" to bring it near to broadband. Has anyone tried it or seen independant reviews of it (in techie forums etc)? It is based on compression technology rather than optimising PC performance so looks to be a new development. It is cheap but what are the negatives? Any thoughts?

Subject: RE: Tech: OnSpeed, any experience with this?
From: Mark Clark
Date: 21 Jan 04 - 12:06 PM

There are a number of ISPs (NetZero is one) offering enhanced speed over dialup. For Web surfing, this can really shorten the time it takes pages to load. What it doesn't do, though, is speed up your connection. File downloads, email, ftp, instant messages, etc., will all remain at the same slow speed. What the speed enhancement does is retrieve all your pages for you and apply a “lossy” compression algorthim to all the images and graphics before sending the page to your computer. The result is that the volume of information going to your PC for a Web page is greatly reduced so the page transfer is much faster. Software stored on your PC then uncompresses everything so your browser can display the page as usual. Anything but Web pages and anything going from your PC to the Internet will still be limited by your usual modem speed.

      - Mark

Subject: RE: Tech: OnSpeed, any experience with this?
From: Bassic
Date: 23 Jan 04 - 03:56 PM

Thanks Mark. Anyone else have experience or news of this particular product?