Is it any better than regular dialup? what are your experiences with it.
I’m using AOL topspeed. It goes a long way towards making dialup tolerable.
Note the disclaimers that these services won’t help DL files that are already compresed, like most songs. What they do is compress the page using their server, and you uncompress it with the program you installed.
But for most web surfing, it probably helps.
I left regular AOL and went to Netzero high speed. I am impressed by how fast it is, especially when opening pages like this one. Getting away from AOL was a nightmare, though…those people just don’t know when to give up.
I apparently had it and didn’t even notice. I mostly visit message boards like this one, and the pages loaded at roughly the same speed whether or not I was on dial-up or high speed.
I moved from regular netzero to high speed and have seen little difference for the most part. As expected, it definitely is not as fast as the commercial demonstrations show. But it does seem faster than the regular service. You see the biggest difference when you have only one window that you browse from at a time. When you browse from multiple windows, it gets bogged down. Unfortunately that’s the way I browse most of the time.
Overall though I’m done with Netzero. I can’t surf for more than about 20 minutes without being kicked out and their connection speeds are slow. The last couple weeks I’ve been trying peoplepc highspeed. I haven’t been kicked out yet and my connection speeds are much quicker, but I don’t like the style very much. Next I’m going to try out toast.net. Their highspeed service is actually a free part of their service and they have more dial-up access numbers in my area than anyone.
So basicly the accelerators help dial-up, but not as much as advertised. Definitely use it for dial-up, but don’t pay too much to do so. I’d lean toward peoplepc from netzero. For a year contract with them, it comes to about $12.95/month for their highspeed service compared to Netzero’s $14.95/month. I connect faster and haven’t gotten kicked out yet. I can’t recommend toast.net since I haven’t tried them out yet, but they are even cheaper than the others. Plus their tech support is free where the others is $2/minute.
i justed wanted to give this a bump. is netzero worth what you get? is peoplepc highspeed better? does getting “kicked out” mean your usage is limited, or does it reflect a technical problem? have you done any experiments where you actually time similar tasks using regular and high-speed dial-up?
You know, I could have sworn that modems had built-in compression since around the 9600bps days, so I’m surprised adding more compression would any difference at all.
The modems don’t know about the whole file though - they are only seeing the data as a stream of packets, or something like that - compression algorithms will often be able to achieve higher ratios with a single large file than they could if presented with the same data broken into smaller segments.
I’ve got the PeoplePC with the MaxSpeed Accelerator(total price $15.95 a month), and I’ve noticed a great improvement. You can choose the level of acceleration, from very low with no change in image quality, to maximum with bad image quality. It also allows you to block banner ads and other in-page advertisements to speed up the process even more. My speed up is approximately 3.9 times my normal speed, and I’ve set mine at midrange.
Don’t they also use caching to shoot pages to you faster?
I use the Juno version, and yes it is faster, but if you count all the crashes, it would be quicker to walk to every web site I wanted to visit. I’m sure Net Zero, as in we have Zero percent satisfaction, just like Juno, is the same. I don’t think there is much I can do. I reinstall the whole pathetic mess, on average once a week, and I’ve still had more Juno related crashes than I care to count.
I have a version of this through USADatanet, who also happens to be our long distance service. For LD the company is great, but I’ve had problems with the accellerator program “forgetting” my password, and once my dial-up account forgot who I was and I spent about 3 hours trying to get back on.
As far as speed goes, it does help, again, not as much as the commercials tell you. But its a lot better than straight-up dial-up.
My accellerator caches and also compresses .jpg and .gif, which is fine for general board surfing but gets to be a pain when I’m scoping for new PS images.
Until they finish the cable line in my neck of the woods, its a lifesaver.