Tiscali Accelerator

trisha

My daughter lives in a remote area and can't get broadband, her internet is painfully slow, to get Tiscali Accelerator does she have to get an account with Tiscali, or will it work with any ISP's dial up?

I can remember how slow dial up is, but hers is ten times worse than that, she sits ages waiting for a web page to download, I gave her my old pc which was a bit faster than hers, but it made no difference.

Does anyone use it and are there any problems with it, I was never happy with Tiscali compared with the old Lineone and am a bit apprehensive about telling her to change to them.

Grover

I believe that Tiscali Accelerator is only available to Tiscali customers as the installation process involves the use of a separate dedicated number. My interpretation anyway, although someone out there may know better....

The fact the she is 'remote' shouldn't affect her dial-up speed too greatly, but the spec of her computer, the configuration of the browser and the running of other programs (anti-virus, firewall, anti-spyware, etc.) will.

From within the browser's internet options, you'll be able to play around with tweaking the settings to see if it makes a difference. Try switching off some of the multi-media 'play' functionality for a start.

Also, what spec is the modem that she is using?

F1F1

trisha wrote:

My daughter lives in a remote area and can't get broadband, her internet is painfully slow, to get Tiscali Accelerator does she have to get an account with Tiscali, or will it work with any ISP's dial up?

I can remember how slow dial up is, but hers is ten times worse than that, she sits ages waiting for a web page to download, I gave her my old pc which was a bit faster than hers, but it made no difference.

Does anyone use it and are there any problems with it, I was never happy with Tiscali compared with the old Lineone and am a bit apprehensive about telling her to change to them.

Tiscali <and possibly other ISPs> use Onspeed. Martin mentions it here - http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cgi-bin/viewnews.cgi?newsid1053251952,43275,#onspeed and there is a MSE thread on it here - http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=43840.

I've used Onspeed for over a year <£25 pa> as we are in a rural area and it will be when Hell freezes over that we get broadband..;) It uses compression to speed up a page loading - you can get more details on their website. 'Broadband speeds' would be overstating it but it does speed things up a bit. There's a slider where you can choose the compression rate whenever you want, depending on what you're doing. The more compression, the faster the page loads, but the more blocky images become. So if I'm looking at something where images are important, I put the slider to the original quality setting.

So it's not a con but it's definitely not broadband either, but it does mean that when a page starts to load, it pretty well all appears fast. We took the viewpoint that it was only £25 for a year, which is 48p a week, so it's not costing a huge fortune and if it speeds thing up a bit, then that's fine.

I've put a demonstration of what the compression looks like up on the internet - http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/cope/onspeed

trisha

According to BT online test for broadband this is the result, so maybe that would effect her dial up internet speed. Apparently all the village has the same problem with it being slow.

Quote:
Our initial test indicates that it is VERY UNLIKELY you will be able to get Broadband from BT due to the very long length of your telephone line.

trisha

I've put a demonstration of what the compression looks like up on the internet - http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/cope/onspeed

Thank you FIFI for that, it's interesting to compare the results, there is quite a difference, but the low compression one wasn't that bad. it would be worth £25 year if she could surf a bit faster, although she doesn't use it all that much, I think she likes to look at e-bay and check her e-mails. So she only needs payg.

Grover

Not to steal F1F1's thunder....it was their link above

trisha

Grover wrote:

Not to steal F1F1's thunder....it was their link above

Oops
I have edited you out now Grover
Thanks for pointing it out to me