dial up internet

I downloaded a free 7 day trial at http://www.zdnet.com.au/downloads/0,39024478,39076722s,00.htm.

I am on broadband so I am not sure how relevant my findings are, but I have done a lot of testing, and my conclusion is that for broadband users (even at 512k) it is probably not worth the money. I did a lot of tess, and even though Onspeed stats were telling me that I was surfing much faster, in actual fact I wasn't. Things were a little faster e.g. a 2.95Mb file download was reduced from 65.8 seconds to 58.2.

Surfing on sites with a lot of pictures was faster generally, but is was only a fraction of a second quicker and you get poorer picture quality as a result.

I tried a lot of internet speed tests - the one on the onspeed website seems to show big speed improvements that are not replicated in real life. Most other speedtests showed a small speed increase, or none at all. Some even showed that it was slower via onspeed.

For a real world test I timed loading a web page with a 49.5 kb picture - without onspeed it took 11.3 seconds. With onspeed switched on the same process took 10.6 seconds ( the delay was in latency in the internet etc) The picture did indeed load faster, but that was because it was compressed to 11.7 kb
The statistics reported that the page was 70kb it was compressed to 15kb which equates to a speed increase of 4.44 (i.e the connection was 4.44 times faster with onspeed. As we already know the real speed increase for the full test (i.e real world) was only 0.06 times faster

So my tests show it can be faster - but certainly not fast enough to warrant paying for it if you have even a slow broadband connection.
Try it for yourselves with the free trial I would be interested to read your experiences.