[OwlBoy]

What is this crap I keep seeing about all these dial-up serveices that claim they are faster than "normal" dial-up?

What do they do? is it a better cache system? Do they make you use 2 modems?

-Owl

[gorickey]

It's all about crappy compression is all...crappy I say...

[AKcrab]

Originally posted by OwlBoy:
Do they make you use 2 modems?

Yep, some do. It's in the fine print.

[mitchell_pgh]

It's a combination of compression, crazy cache on your HD, bla bla bla...

I bet if you have the perfect modem, and the software installed in a specific way, and have any error checking on etc. etc. it would work.

But I'm guessing

[malvolio]

I like the tiny disclaimer at the bottom of the TV screen: "Will not improve download speeds."
Get real broadband, suckers!

[Gankdawg]

What it means is that the money gets sucked out of your wallet faster.

[- - e r i k - -]

The "faster" dialup you get with "will not speed up download speed" is just their own proxy-servers caching commonly used webpages for you.

Who cares about dialup anymore though?

[MaxPower2k3]

i thought it just compressed HTML on-the-fly and sent it to you to be decompressed on your end (which is why it requires special software). that's also why downloads can't be sped up, nor will images load (considerably) faster

[wataru]

Originally posted by MaxPower2k3:
i thought it just compressed HTML on-the-fly and sent it to you to be decompressed on your end (which is why it requires special software). that's also why downloads can't be sped up, nor will images load (considerably) faster

That was my first guess, too.

[OwlBoy]

Ok, thought it was some gimmick like that.

-Owl

[chabig]

I don't know about compressed html, but they do compress images at the server end. Therefore they take less time to download to your machine. Most people don't notice the degradation in image quality, but they do notice the faster speed.

Chris

[chalk_outline]

Originally posted by MaxPower2k3:
i thought it just compressed HTML on-the-fly and sent it to you to be decompressed on your end (which is why it requires special software). that's also why downloads can't be sped up, nor will images load (considerably) faster

It just loads text faster. For example this page is 1047 line of text. 67K. Slashdot did a story a while back and found out it does work. I would prefer real broadband but whatever..


[edit: Broadband stamps.. LOL]

[moonmonkey]

Originally posted by chabig:
I don't know about compressed html, but they do compress images at the server end. Therefore they take less time to download to your machine. Most people don't notice the degradation in image quality, but they do notice the faster speed.

Chris

Most complex PHP/ASP pages use compresion anyway.
I would probably slow these down.

I guess.

Broadband is the way to go anyway.

[Ω]

I will be doing some beta testing for a mac version coming up. Not sure what the deal is, but I will ask them how it works.

For those who are still on 56k connections, where broadband is about 4 times more expensive, and this option is FREE, I think I will give it a try.

[Kilbey]

A friend at work has the Nextel wireless cellular modem and it makes images on web pages appear with horrible artifacts. It is annoying enough that I cannot browse the web using his computer.

Well, that and the fact that it is a HP laptop running XP.

But seriously, it is still slow and the images are barely recognizable.

[OwlBoy]

Oh? so it actually re-compresses jpegs? damn, thats gotta suck. Compressing jpegs is kind of an art, and then they do a **** it up.

-Owl

[goMac]

I tried this once.

All it does is lower image quality so they don't take as long to load.

It sucked badly.