Are you a dial-up user looking for a faster connection, but don't like Broadband prices? If so, you should take a look at a new service called OnSpeed, which has received rave reviews in Internet technology publications.What OnSpeed does is to re-route web pages and email via its own servers, compressing
data on fly prior to sending it onwards to your PC. A small program then decompresses data, so that you can view it in normal way via your browser or email client.
In my own dial-up tests, with a modem running at a nominal 49kb/s I appeared to get speeds close to that of my normal broadband connection of 598 kb/s - very impressive. Image quality is often reduced but compression for this can be improved, though with an adverse effect on speed of course.
Also some file types like MP3 cannot yet be compressed. The company is working on these issues however and expects to find solutions soon.
Unfortunately I was unable to use email in my tests, due to a 'port' conflict with a spam filter that I was using. The standard advice on OnSpeed site for such cases is to disable offending program. Not a constructive approach - to say least - so I hope that relevant instructions will be changed soon.
