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Starry Night · Mar 2, 2006, 06:06 PM

Aloha,

I couldn't decide which is the most appropriate forum for this, I apologize if this is the wrong one.

I saw an ad in the recent MacWorld for OWC dialup internet service called FasterMac.net. They offer unlimited dialup for $6.95 per month and accelerated dialup for $9.95 per month. I currently pay $22.87 (MSN) per month for dialup (where I live there are no dsl lines just cable which costs $45 per month, more than I can afford).

Has anyone used FasterMac or something like it? Is there any reason I shouldn't switch? It's so much less expensive it makes me wonder if its too good to be true.

Thanks for any advice!

wataru · Mar 2, 2006, 07:27 PM

Accelerated dialup is bullshît. All they do is compress the data going through the pipe, but the majority of the data on a site is already compressed (in the form of images or binaries), so you get little-to-no speedup for real-world use.

Starry Night · Mar 2, 2006, 10:49 PM

Thanks for the tip. I tried out FasterMac. I timed a few pages to see if they loaded faster with the turbo vs. without. Often they were 25% faster but to get the speed the image quality suffered.

My biggest problem was that I couldn't reliably connect. Sometimes it would work, sometimes I'd get a modem error. This happend over and over, off and on. I've had MSN for 4 years, never a problem thus I trashed everything to do with FasterMac Turbo and have gone back to MSN.

Being able to reliably connect is more important than saving a few dollars. And through the course of this exploration, MSN lowered my monthly fee from $22.95 to $15.95, thus it wasn't an entire waste of time.

wataru · Mar 2, 2006, 10:58 PM

I see, I hadn't considered the idea of reducing image quality. That's really pretty stupid, if you ask me. I'd save my money and go with standard dialup, or just admit defeat and get cable.

Starry Night · Mar 2, 2006, 11:40 PM

Yeah, it's part of the preference settings for the "turbo", you can move a slider to set image quality, the lower the image quality, the higher the speed and vice versus. Text and other non image items don't load any faster, just the images. But at $7 per month, I'd be happy with non turbo loading images, but the lack of being able to connect consistently during the 4 -5 hours that I had it, was a deal breaker.

Supposedly they're going to put DSL in my area this summer. If I got cable, I fear I'd get lost in WoW, dialup keeps me more productive

And the turbo part doesn't work with my extensions tricked out FireFox, only Safari and IE.....