In its adds, Earthlink claims that it’s dial up service can be upto 5X faster than AOL.
If that’s true, then I just have two questions.
How is this done?
Is there any software (from AOL or third party) that can be used with AOL to get the same results?
Thanks.
Caching: Earthlink’s web hosts store recent versions of popular web pages and serve you from their stored copies rather than the original ones. This eliminates delays caused by transmission across the actual internet network, and by slow remote hosts. Presumably they do update their cached copies when the original host pages change.
Use Internet Explorer: Minimize AOL. Launch Explorer. Go under Tools>Options>General and under Temporary Internet Files, click Settings. There’s a place to enter an amount of disk space to use for temporary internet files, i.e., your local cache. Make that as big as you can stand it. There are buttons there to tell IE where to put the files, so if you have another drive or partition with more space than your boot volume, then use that.
Oh, and I left out an important step in number 2): Then use Internet Explorer to browse the web.
AOL may have similar cache setting options, but someone else will need to tell you how to change them.
Earthlink Accelerator also makes use of compression, where webpages are compressed before being sent to you, and images are reduced in quality. Normal dialup service is also compressed, but the Earthlink Accelerator compression is slightly more efficient.
The main benefit is in so-called precaching, where the system tracks what websites you visit most often, and downloads them when you’re not using the computer. This means that when you do want to visit them, they’ve already been stored for you and don’t need to be downloaded.
It’s really all marketing BS. Everything of any non-trivial size is compressed anyway plus high speed modems compress data as well. You can actually lower the thru rate by adding too many layers of compression.
Caching at the ISP end is a lose. There are many pages that don’t get time-stamped right, and the ISP keeps feeding you the old pages rather than downloading the new one. (At least at my end I can hit “shift-reload”, but if they’re caching for you. You’re sunk.) For dial up the bottleneck is the modem. This doesn’t do anything good and actually mucks a lot of things up.
So any ISP that tells you theirs is faster, is full of it. You can get cheaper, just as good, service from a lot of other places.
And never use an ISP’s “enhancer” software. Spyware and worse is tucked into those. (Which rules out AOL completely. Not a bad thing at all since it isn’t an ISP in the first place.)
Yeah, I tried accelerator software with little to no results, and a whole lot of spyware.
Actually, I saw something about AOL 9.0 that stated that it caches the sites that you visit for faster viewing, but I don’t think that AOL compresses anything, or at least I didn’t see anything mentioning that.
Anyway, thanks to everybody, and since it’s the 25th, Merry Christmas too.
A lot of web servers compress pages anyway, if you have a browser that supports gzip encoding (IE does).
FWIW, and I can only testify to Midcontinent Communications (cable), go cable modem. It’s only 10-20 bucks more a month, much faster than MSN DSL, and if you hit a snag, they can tell you exactly how to fix it. (Though rare). And if you have a problem with the network, they can tell you exactly where it is, and how long it will take to fix.
I’ve had it for 15 months (running Windows XP) and was offline for 10 hours while setting up the new PC. Otherwise, I’ve been able to haunt the internet non-stop. 
Give up the dial-up shit. Join us!
AOL always seemed to have so much overhead, and getting worse. all those windows that popup when you start up, news, buddies list, whatever, eats bandwidth.