I’ve been hearing a lot of ads on the radio lately for AOL’s new broadband service. They make a claim that it works with and enhances your broadband connection. How exactly does it do this? Or is this a blatant case of false advertising, since most people who use AOL tend not to know what they are doing?
They probably mean “enhances” as in “allows you to access proprietary AOL crap”.
Perhaps they mean that they “enhance” your broadband with additional content. A bit misleading if that is the case.
There are some tweaks that can be done to speed up a broadband connection a bit – maybe they offer that. it that’s the case, you can do the same thing yourself at a number of sites such as dslreports.
I don’t think it is false advertising, but it may be shady. Hell, IE or Netscape or Mozilla can also say the same thing. What good is a high speed connection if you can’t actually access the content?
The thing in the commercial that bothers me more is the idea that high speed connections are more likely to get spam and be the target of hackers.
A fair number of AOL do not know what they are doing, and that they can protect themselves if they wanted to. However, these are the same people who think that AOL is the internet.
Well, if you have broadband, then you’re most likely always connected, and if you’re always connected, then you are at a slightly higher risk for hackers scanning for suitable zombie machines and the like.
Of course, a decent firewall and updated security patches will take care of that problem.
Maybe they just store more web stuff on your HD so you can access it faster & thus, makes it look like things are faster.
There was another service provider (Earthlink I think) about a year ago that made a similar-sounding claim. I checked into it, and found out that their servers would compress data, and they had the decompressing software on your PC, so that less data had to be transmitted. Unfortunately, this idea works well only for text, which loads fast anyway - it’s the web page graphics that you have to wait for.
Yeah, anyone putting stuff on the web is probably well aware of the bandwidth consideration. (I know I sure am).
Slight hijack - pretty much all servers and browsers support Content-Encoding by gzip, which compresses requested data before transmitting it. Any service using pure compression on top of this would be a waste of time.
For all the basic stuff, web browsing, email, USENET, ftp, etc., the broadband ISP provides it all. AOL itself provides very, very little. “Keywords” and that’s about it. AIM doesn’t require AOL (and if they ever cut off non-AOL people, they’d end up just losing customers). And to top it all off, AOL doesn’t provide nearly all of the standard features of an real ISP.
In short, there is no justifiable reason to add AOL if you have a broadband account. This means AOL is in deep trouble on the “bleeding edge” of the Internet. So you run ads. Lots and lots of ads. Hoping to get current AOL users to believe they need to sign up to AOL and broadband.
Pay more for less. What a business model!
Nanoda: Actually, you’d be shocked how few servers actually use gzip. Even text-heavy sites running Apache often don’t. This is probably for the same reason that we haven’t converted all our GIFs to PNG; the fact that most webmasters don’t put much effort into performance optimizations as long as the site works. Also, gzip compression does increase server load, so in some cases its contraindicated.
I don’t know if it’s true in general, but I’ve had a lot more problems with hackers since I changed from dial-up to cable modem. One of my co-workers said the same thing, but then we are on the same ISP.
- (I hate repeating what others have said). There is practically no justification for compressing data sent over the Internet. All the big stuff is compressed already. Compressing the small stuff doesn’t help enough to be worth anybody’s time.
Also, for dialup people, the modem connection is a huge bottleneck. But any modern modem already uses compression and adding another layer of compression on top of that is a complete negative.
So forget compression. Any compression that would do any good has already been done.
2a. Hacker’s and broadband. Hacker’s love to get into a broadband computer. A dialup machine is far, far less interesting. The broadband computer can be used for all sorts of things, especially since it is online for a lot longer, perhaps even 24/7. It’s hard to coordinate a DoS if most of your zombies are offline. It’s only a slight difference in difficulty. The juiciness of the target is the issue.
2b. (Email) Spam and broadband. People with broadband tend to be online a lot longer and do a lot more things. Therefore one should expect that their email will leak out more often and be picked up by spammers. Saying broadband causes more spamming is putting the cart before the horse.
(There are popup ads run via MS’s messenger service. Being on broadband certainly makes it easier to get those, but again, mainly because of the amount of time connected.)
If you want to avoid spam, step 1 is to not get an AOL account.
So perhaps they just put more cache and cookies on your hard drive? I guess that would make things a little faster.
Basically, they are charging you $15 a month (in ADDITION to the $50 or so you are already paying for broadband) to access their proprietary content - AOL chat rooms, AOL E-Mail, AOL news, AOL classifieds, etc. Things that are inferior to free services already available on the web.
The only advantage AOL has over other ISP’s is their mail servers. If I’m not mistaken, they give you huge amounts of space (enough to receive and send attachments several hundred megabytes in size). Of course, what good is that when the mail software is shit.