I keep seeing these commercials for the “high-speed” dial-up access for these companies (or at least that is what NetZero’s is; It looks like AOL Broadband is aimed at DSL/Cable Modem people).
After googling it, I found this Infoworld article that explains NetZero’s claim that their high-speed service utilizes data compression, and webpage caching to provide dial-up access that is up to 5 times faster.
I thought that this “high speed technology” has already been utilized… am I misunderstanding something? Isn’t data usually compressed before it is downloaded to your computer’s browser? And doesn’t IE already provide a cache for webpages (Internet temp files), as well as Netscape?
I’m hoping that I am just overlooking something, and that people aren’t being blantantly ripped off.
LilShieste
Some ISPs cache frequently accessed web pages. It makes it faster for you since you only have to pull them off their server through their network, rather than through the Internet.
I consider it to be an undesirable feature, myself. Leads to problems on often updated pages, since you don’t always get the latest version of the page.
Modem connections are already compressed, so precompression by the ISP isn’t likely to gain much. Further, properly configured web servers already send data GZIP compressed, which will offer better compression than anything the ISP can offer. The only thing they can do is reduce the quality of images in transit, like AOL, or use caching and intelligent pre-caching to reduce the amount of data that actually has to be downloaded. Your web browser should cache data already, leaving pre-caching as the last viable method of improving performance. This will only do wonderful things to the sites you visit on the most regular basis, and has the problem of leaving you with out-of-date content, like Joey G mentioned.
People are getting ripped off. It’s as simple as that.
Most data is compressed as much as it’s gonna get. ‘Data’ as in text files, pictures, page layouts, etc. They might be able to compress text by a few more percentage points, but, what’s the point? It takes me a maximum of 5 seconds to load a page of text and 20 seconds for pictures. Do a google search on the v.92 protocol to get more details about net compression.
Their high speed service has no effect on downloading movies or playing online games. And what else would high speed access be needed for but those two? You would be better off getting cable/DSL. There is a limit to compression beyond which nothing more can be accomplished. Certain things like online gaming can’t be compressed either (as far as I know).
I imagine most of their speed boost is going to come from caching files. Caching on a local server like Joey G said speeds it up somewhat. However, the key words here are ‘frequently accessed’ web pages. It is almost useless if you like to wander around randomly like me. The first time you go to a site, it would take just as long as it does normally. Then there’s the other problem Joey G mentioned.
Try Anonymizer to get a idea of how these types of proxies work. You’ll soon realize it’s just a trick with smoke and mirrors.
I have a 56k so I’ve done some research into speeding this thing up. There are things you can do to speed up surfing but netzero high speed service is not one of them.
Mine does this and it is very annoying. I will make a change to my web page but I cannot see the result for hours because I keep getting the old version. I do not know why the SDMB is not cached and works fine. Strange. Maybe it only caches HTM pages and not asp or php
There was a product I used that effectivly speed up dialup service. While reading a web site that was fully loaded this program would start loading all links on that page. When it worked (about 50% of the time) you would be pulling the page off your harddrive as it was DL’ed and cashed about 1 minute ago. If you clicked too fast (clicked through a web page instead of reading it then clicking) or typed something in (like in google) it would not help but not hurt either. Cnet did an artical years back which said if more people started using these programs it could slow the web to a crawl. Perhaps such technology is being used for Netzero HS dialup?
If it’s only 5 times faster than dial-up, I can’t see it being called “high speed”. I have cable and consider that high speed. BTW, Rolla is a great little town. I was at Leonard Wood a few years and loved it.
Man. I was trying to be optimistic about the whole thing, but it looks like it is just a huge scam. Thanks for all of your input, everyone.
I can certainly see the downside to ISPs holding a cache of webpages for it’s subscribers, and I agree that it probably isn’t worth the trade-off for “high speed.”
[hijack]Thanks, hermann. Yeah, it’s a nice town to visit (or stay at for a few years), but I am looking forward to getting my B.S. come December. [/hijack]
LilShieste
Try adding a ? to the end of the URL you want. It will often fool the cache, since it appears as a new URL to retrieve. The webserver will ignore the ?.
Whether your ISP caches or not is not usually going to have much noticeable impact. It’s not the access time and time from the server to the ISP, it’s the 56K into your computer which is the bottleneck.
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