Onspeed/Broadband Substitute merged thread

andy88_2

Mike you are right that sometimes there are latency issues; maybe something similar to DNS lookup; the first page viewed on a site may take longer than subsequent ones.

It is also true that the quality of some pictures can be affected, but in may cases this does not matter. Webpages with simple blocks of colour appear unaffected. The only effect on a text-based page like this is on the orange menu to the left. On a dial-up connection page-loading time is cut to about a quarter of the time or less eg 14 > 3 s; this is easily noticeable as the loading time is much longer for secure pages. So I'm happy enough.

At the moment I do not use the internet for downloading bandwidth-intensive material (I see some ISPs sacking customers who use 50-150 GB a month; what are they doing?), so my view was that for low usage, maybe that payg broadband connection charged on capacity, the compression would reduce the bill eg 200MB £10 > £2.30. This would be the main point; you are probably right that 40 times faster on text-based small documents (2 MB connection + 10 times acceleration) would not show up compared with say 1/4 second ping times.

It's interesting that you say it's so hopeless then tell us that Opera are planning something similar.

andy88_2

This may well be redundant in the light of announcements about 8 Mb/s

theloft

mike_paterson said - "Opera is a freebie, and I guess version 7.6 will cause a few worries for onspeed"

Can anyone recommend Opera, have heard of it but not been brave enough to try it. Also is the free version any good or do you have to buy to get the real McCoy !!

maneesh_2

I use onspeed, very good compression (military it says), but i leave my graphics on full, so it doesn't compress that, but is still very good as it does compress text very very well.

And it also compresses upstream and "others" it's called on it.

andy88_2

Thanks for pointing to net4nowt on another thread, Mike. I found

BT Yahoo! dial-up customers can now enjoy surfing at speeds up to 5x faster than ordinary dial-up. The company has teamed up with OnSpeed

http://www.net4nowt.com/isp_news/news_article.asp?News_ID=2705

mike_paterson

andy88 wrote:

Thanks for pointing to net4nowt on another thread, Mike. I found
http://www.net4nowt.com/isp_news/news_article.asp?News_ID=2705

Yes certain bits of your browsing might be up to 5 times faster. but everybody needs to bear in mind that a) most compressible items are already compressed (onspeed reduces the picture quality to achieve compression) and b) It is absolutely impossible for your whole internet experience to be increased x 5 using onspeed. c) at the end of the day the size of your pipe is 57.6 kbps (if you are lucky) and you have a huge limiting factor. Standard modems are also prone to errors so the effective speed is always below the maximum. d) if you want to really speed up your browsing make sure you switch off images and get a pop-up stopper.

Yes onspeed will give you a slight improvement if you are unfortunate enough to be on an exchange that does not support braodband - but please try it first - free 7 day trial at https://www.download.com and see for yourselves. If you are broadband - you will not even notice the difference it makes - apart from the poor picture quality, plus the fact that it often makes things slower (at least it did when I tested it)

Regards
Mike.

andy88_2

It compresses text by 10 to 25 times with no deleterious effects.

Even for people on broadband, it could be useful for stretching caps on usage

netdumdum

Hi, Just thought I would let you know that I saw an advert in the paper for https://www.onspeed.com. They claim to boost your internet connection using software, I gave it a go its £24.99, and it boosted my 256k connection to nearly 400khas anyone else used it?

I reckon its pretty good and would recommend it.

peter_the_planter

Out of curiosity how did you check the speed rating, what was your download speed before using it?

Smartasss

It does work (bear in mind any images will lose their quality, but you can temporarily disable it if you want to see best quality images) - best advice is Mike Paterson's - get a free trial and see if you like it. Much cheaper than BB.

(Though it does improve broadband as well.)