(OT) High speed dial up connection?

[Simon Diamond]

I don't normally pay much attention to ads in magazines, but I noticed one in the latest issue of WebUser (a UK magazine) for www.onspeed.com.

They claim to be able to speed up a normal 56k dial up connection by up to 5 times. And apparently this only costs £24.99 ($39.99).

What is the catch?

Simon

[paland]

Two catches. In the US, you can get the same thing for $12-16 per month. I don't know what the average cost per ISP is in the UK but I'll bet you can find one much cheaper. The second catch is that your speed is still 56K and downloads will not be any faster. Only your pages will load somewhat faster.

[Simon Diamond]

Sorry I forgot to mention - thats £24.99 or $39.99 a year, not a month.

I think what you say about downloads is about right, but if you are on 56k dial up already then it might be worth a try. If anybody does check this out, let me know how you get on.

Simon

[paland]

Then the price is right. If you're going to use dial-up, then I would get the optimized version.

[mosch]

onspeed works by recompressing the graphics at onspeed's servers, thus making them smaller, but uglier. It won't make other large file downloads faster.

[BBill]

The UK Has got to get wired for broadband (cable or DSL) thats all there is to it. Is there any talk of this in city planning ?
Actually DSL can run on phone lines you just have to be within 2 miles of the Central Office where the phone switching equipment is.
Broadband makes the Internet a much more enjoyable place. If I lived there I would lobby for it - this would be my highest priority!

[Simon Diamond]

I have it. Most of the UK can get it if they wish, it is mainly out of town areas that struggle to get it.

Simon

[BBill]

Oh okay - lol for some reason I was of the idea that DSL or calbe was scarce there. I know that many people have to deal with a brief disconnect every hour or so. I'm just somewhat spoiled with cable and would have a difficult time going back to dial-up.
If you have broadband why do you want to consider souped up 56k ?

[Simon Diamond]

I don't, though my family cannot get DSL so it may be an option for them. I am mainly interested in the concept behind it.

Simon

[Bubmack]

I used to use it before my cable modem was installed. ("hi-speed" that is)

It does make your pages download faster, but at some serious reduced levels of quality. At the fastest setting..I could barely make out any of the images. It almost seemed as if it reduced the # of pixels...like a large area of a pic would all be the same color. So you would end up getting a blobs of color that would make the pic unidentifiable. So it was great when I just wanted to read...but sucked for regular surfing.

Bubs