Hi-speed dial-up

Has anybody had any experience with using the compression and caching software that some ISPs offer that reputedly speeds dial-up access?

I live in a resort area where DSL isn't available and never will be, cable isn't very reliable (and probably never will be) and dial-up is painfully slow - the phone lines are staticky and subject to corrosion by salt water, and occasionally the phones go down entirely!

My ISP has some new software they're making available, but it requries the use of Internet Explorer, which I really dislike. Obviously I can use both IE and Netscape as needed, but I'm curious to know whether there's anything to recommend this stuff. I tried something similar about three years ago and was completely underwhelmed!

 

There is nothing your ISP can do that will increase the rate you get from your phone lines. If they still insist. ask them for a 3Oday trial free.

 

Maybe nothing to increase phone line speed but if they can compress/decompress, you can get more data without a phone line improvement.

 

bentley--I think the promotion for this will tell you that it will not increase download speeds. However, it may allow quicker access to websites. If that aspect is meaningful to you, and the magnitude of improvement is tangible, then maybe it is a good deal ($5/month?). As aleekat has suggested, can you get a free trial? Or, if not, can you try it and pay for, say, one month, and then cancel without penalty if you do not feel it worthwhile?

 

Bentley, I think you are asking about WebJet. It does do as advertised as I already given it a test drive.
It configures your dial up networking to use a proxy. I did do some monitoring using Kerio's Firewall Status window, and noticed that while data was passed through the proxy, IE did open, at some points several, TCP ports on it's own, and they were in use.
If you are using a HOSTS file, you will have some problems with the sites in the HOSTS file, unless the IP is 127.0.0.1 .
The data is compressed by your ISP servers, sent to you, then uncompressed. The compression ratio [3 settings] can be adjusted, increasing data transfer speed. At higher speeds, photos lose some data, they warn you of this when adjusting.
Used at the slowest speed, I noticed simple graphics appeared a bit grainy, some things did not seem in the right place. For example, the black user buttons, such as Post Reply, on this webpage had a blue bar through the middle of them, some things appeared a bit grainy.
I could post replies here so the forms seemed to work okay.
My ISP provides this free of charge.
I didn't try it on any streaming audio or video, or game sites like pogo.
All in all, it was satisfactory to use, the visual loss was slight, no problems with the software. If you want quality graphics, you'll have to disable it.

 

Bently

I also live in a place where dial up is the only option for all us people who now have electricity. To the best of my knowledge any of the so called magic internet speed programs are simply window dressing which enable access to the tweaks already included in windows settings.

 

I do some work for the ISP and get my connection for free, so the issue for me really isn't financial, it's whether it's going to be worth it to switch to IE in order to see the reputed speed. Anything that will get me faster access at home will be a benefit, but it's good to know what the pitfalls might be.

I have DSL at my office when I need to download something really big, and I'm usually not terribly concerned with the graphics quality, but these issues are useful to be aware of before I start working on the marketing for this stuff. The software that I had tried previously just didn't do the trick - and that was in a house with good phone lines - so I was a little wary of this new version before I'd gotten some feedback from people who have used something comparable. Thanks, as always!

 

My small-town ISP which I trust is touting this compression thing and offering a month free. I've downloaded the software and will try it for a while (if I can convince myself to go off cable for a while!).

The software they are using is from this company:

http://www.fourelle.com/products.html

In theory, with poorer quality images, and I noticed that this software actually connects to a dedicated server, there may be something to it. I'll let you know.

 

I had the opportunity to try out the web accelerator I mentioned. It really was impressive.

The Venturi program I tried had 5 possible levels of compression. It compresses data in all transfer protocols, but it appears that only image information is compressed. Your standard zip or exe download speed is unchanged. The image quality of web pages is correspondingly reduced but the subjective sense is that the pages load about 3 times faster.

Most of the images are of acceptable quality (and can be returned to their original by changing settings), with the advantage that ads are faded somewhat as well.

The CNET web speed test gave me 106k for speed (it tests using a jpg image download) as opposed to the 20k-40k that 56k dial-up usually gives.

There seemed no restriction on which browser to use. Netscape, Opera, Avant, and IE worked equally well. And other programs, such as KazaaLite and Outlook Express worked as usual.

Overall, for the $20 a year that my ISP is charging, I think it is well worth the price for those days when the cable is out. The few seconds saved here and there while browsing can add up to significant time after a while.

Note: The xml file in the program's folder contains many entries similar to the "Hide" entries in the sysoc.inf file. By enabling the showing of these, the number of options and level of control over the program are greatly increased, though the default settings still seemed like the most reasonable choices.

 

I was always told compressing "graphics" had little gain, with trade offs in degraded quality. $20 bucks a year with noticable improvements sounds like a good deal.