Has anyone tried Onspeed? 12 April 2005 at 11:39AM edited 30 November -1 at 1:00AM in Broadband & Internet Access 82 replies 67.4K views

iargent

They are overhead telephone lines and you can here the crackling on the line, my dad has similar problems and he has asked them to turn up the gain, made no difference. He also shares the line with the next door neighbours which reduces the chance of him having a high speed connection. BT response to slow connections "We don't guarantee the speed of a telephone line" "As long as you have a service then you are ok"
This is where onspeed then helps!

Edinburghlass_2

***It has been brought to my attention that a user has been spamming other users who have posted on this particular thread.

If you have received a pm from another user regarding Onspeed, please report the pm to Abcon.

Or in fact if you are approached by any user offering unsolicited goods please report.

Thank you Board Guide***

camellia_2

I think OnSpeed is awful, I tried it last year and had nothing but problems. The Online help didn't and emails were not answered for days. Several attempts to telephone them resulted in engaged signals, two unanswered even after holding on for well over three minutes! When I did speak to support staff none of their advice helped, they didn't even tell me how to uninstall properly! I eventually had to resort to a very expensive phone call to a certain computer company support line who sorted the problem in 2 minutes!

mbspuk

I think you need to go back and do your homework properly. You clearly have no understanding of privacy issues.

Andy88 wrote:

What is the problem with the privacy policy?

They use personal information for contractual contact with the customer. So do all company/customer relationships.

They collect information on visitors to their own website, that is used to improve the performance of that site - not unusual; millions of sites do this.

They collect aggregated statistics on usage and other sites visited, none of which can be used to identify individual customers. Again millions do this. How do you think the companies that publish info on which sites are the most popular get the info - from ISPs possibly?

The Guardian website mentioned has 3 cookies and 3 ad serving links that infringe my privacy policy and are blocked; others are shown; this info will have been sent to their advertisers. Onspeed's site does not do this. Perhaps that journalist is protesting too much.

There are no grounds whatsoever for an implication above that Onspeed is serving advertising on visited websites. All ISPs have the same type of info on visited sites, and do not do this either.

I am a satisfied customer. I like to see informed discussion about its merits or otherwise and suitability for different types of customers, not distorted and misleading interpretations of half-absorbed third-party articles, from people who are too lazy to form their own opinion

As I've said before, it compresses text-based pages like this, and emails, by a factor of 15 to 25. A 30-post 200k page from MSE takes about 3 seconds.

People who do extensive downloads of video and audio would experience little advantage, but it seems highly likely that such people will have been on broadband for a long time and are hardly the target customers.

andy88_2

mbspuk wrote:

I think you need to go back and do your homework properly. You clearly have no understanding of privacy issues.

Thank you for your not very prompt reply. If you want to patronise people, at least make the effort to do it properly.

This is from the Guardian article you mention

The other issue with programs such as OnSpeed is privacy, and its potential exploitation. If all your pages are going via OnSpeed then it knows what you are doing, and this information is valuable for serving advertisements. You should definitely read the privacy policy at https://www.onspeed.com/privacy.php before signing up, and that's why I will be signing off.

There is no evidence whatsoever to support the implied allegation that Onspeed or my ISP have used or would use information on which sites I visit either for adserving or to pass on information about me to third parties.

As I said, the Guardian page itself contains privacy-invading and ad-serving elements from DoubleClick, AtlasDMT, and four from one variously called BurstingPipe or Eyeblaster, that are identified by well-known anti-spyware programs and blocked as a result of their conduct. If you know more about the behaviour of Onspeed than the authors of those programs, perhaps you would arrange to contact them to discuss whether they should blacklist it.

These are from the AtlasDMT privacy policy on the Guardian page - only about a quarter of it

"Unique identifiers issued by a website or service for the purpose of identifying an individual over time."

"Information gathered by the purchase of a product or service, including information about the method of payment."

"Information about an individual's finances including account status, account balance, payment or overdraft history, and information about an individual's purchase or use of financial instruments, including credit cards or debit cards."
"Mechanisms, such as HTTP cookies, for maintaining an active connection with an individual or for automatically identifying an individual who has visited a particular site or previously accessed particular content.

Information about membership in or affiliation with groups such as religious organisations, trade unions, professional associations, political parties, etc.

Information about an individual's physical or mental health, sexual orientation, use of or inquiry into health care services orproducts and purchase of health care services or products."

To criticise Onspeed and not the spyware products on the page attacking it smacks of hypocracy. If the Guardian journalist or people quoting it, like you,,choose to decry Onspeed's privacy policy for the fact that a track is kept on its own visited pages and anonymously fed to web statistic sites, as all websites may do, then he or you might care to point out to people who as yet do not benefit from anti-spyware products the exact nature of AtlasDMT's creeping invasion of privacy. AtlasDMT website front page a "hot topic" of interest is how to continue tracking people despite cookie deletion

Hot Topic: The Atlas Institute examines the impact of cookie deletion on conversion tracking, reach and frequency analysis, and profile targeting based on an analysis of behavioral data

As I say, you are wasting your time preaching to me; you should address yourself to Lavasoft, Safer Networking, Microsoft, WebRoot and others.

Until then, I will continue to use Onspeed and block spyware products in accordance with anti-spyware program recommendations

If you must persist in criticising my continuing naivety, at least deign to educate all of us by spending time writing more than a one-sentence put-down

andy88_2

I'm going to add to that post, as I did some homework

*The Onspeed privacy policy refers to its own site.*

Excerpts -
"This policy only applies to the web site hosted by ONSPEED ... "

"We may provide aggregated statistics about our sales, customers, traffic patterns and other site information to third parties, but these statistics will not include any information that could personally identify you."

"This cookie may allow us to:
Limit how often you see a particular advertisement or announcement on our web site. [my italics]
Identify your preferences when customising content for you.
Provide you with relevant self-help information.
Record how many times you visit a page or advertisement.
Confirm you are a registered user and save your login details when accessing certain services on our website,
Collect statistics on the use of our services.
We may also use cookies to ensure that our mailing tools are working properly "

Again, this policy pertains to the Onspeed website only. This means that I may see different Onspeed adverts on my own visits to the Onspeed site.

It does not mean in any way that they control what adverts I see when visiting other websites, which as already implied, are supplied by companies already well-known in the field.

Therefore, mbspuk, I respectfully suggest ...

I think you need to go back and do your homework properly. You clearly have no understanding of privacy issues.

... you retract your attack on Onspeed, based on the half-baked incompletely-researched hypocritical remarks in a 15 month old newspaper and on your own laziness.

mike_paterson

I managed to find a link for a 14 day free trial of onspeed so that you can try it out for yourselves - https://www.onspeed.com/en/trial/?id=x7e0fu3&A=retail-trial
Cheers
Mike

murphydavid

Just read MartinsMoneyTips and downloaded the Tiscali accelerator. I am already a Tiscali weekday daytime customer at £5.00 a month. Best I can find. But they did not tell me about the accelerator when they introduced it (or maybe they did and I missed it). Anyway their performance meter says I have already saved 5 minutes and 38 seconds.
Thanks Martin

spook

Google have just announced a similar tool, aimed at broadband users. It's free and it sounds like it works in the same way as OnSpeed.

http://webaccelerator.google.com/

Spook

Kay

It's been a fantastic programme for me - I've got an O2 Aircard that costs £17 a month, and allows me to download 36MB on my laptop (my only internet connection) for that £17. 36MB isn't that much, and it was excruciatingly slow to load anything. I saw Onspeed advertised in the Times, and thought it was worth a go. I've now got normal dial up speeds, and can download 6 or 7 times the amount for the same price per month. £25/year well spent in my book.

Seems it depends very much on what your existing connection's like - if it's slow, then this is worth trying out. My mum's got a really bad phone line, she's been told she can't get broadband where she is and her connection is slow, so it'll be worth it for her. If you've got good speeds already, it probably won't make that much of an effect or saving for you.

Definitely recommend it for GPRS connections. Have edited the post as I've just checked the Onspeed stats - I've just downloaded 1MB, and Onspeed has compressed it to 130KB, without too much problem with graphics. Ran our whole website for the election campaign using it, and I'm still not over my £17 a month for access.