"high speed" dial-up

S

sak_collector

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Jan 25, 2005
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I live in a place where no high speed access is available. I have seen commercials for netzero high speed dial up and looked at their site. As I understand it, actual download speeds wont improve, but browsing is supposed to be much faster.

Please educate me on how this works if you know. Would it be worth using for me for casual browsing?
 
I would recommend netzero simply because they have attractive rates. the 9.99 package should be fine, I'd put my money on the fact that the "high speed" is accomplished by just caching the sites you visit frequently so instead of loading it everytime fresh it just pulls up the stored data. In other words, I wouldn't recommend paying 14.99 for just caching... Is it gimmicky? if that is what they are doing then yes it's gimmicky. honestly theres no way to get you faster if you're using a v.90 modem between ISP's so anything they tell you about having some kind of secret mojo to make it faster than 40kbps is balogna.
 
i use netzero-have fo 5 years or so-i do 15 dollar package because you get virus protection with it-
very reliable,few problems at all-
 
I have dsl now, but was very pleased with netzero with accelerator. Forbes or someone, tested three high speed dial ups and netzero was the better of the three.
 
Thanks for the info. I went ahead and got it a little while ago. I was paying 9.95 and netzero had the high-speed for 9.95 also for the first 12 months so I figured its worth a shot.

Seems to do a pretty good job. Seems one of the tricks is to reduce the image quality of pictures, but its very easy to select the pictures you want to see full quality. For a person stuck with dial-up like me, this is a pretty nice change.
 
Actually I think most of those services work by manipulating the data bits in order to get more out of each bit transfered. It all revolves around algortihims of what can be dropped, and compressing the data as much as possible.
 
Rat Finkenstein said:
"High Speed Dial up" is an oxymoron.
You can't have both.
Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly. I'm a CCNA and I'll tell you no amount of tomfoolery will make a dialup connection truly faster.
 
How does it work? Simple: data compression.

Pictures, for example, and so much of the web is graphics and pictures these days, can be compressed 10:1. Of course, there's a loss of quality that results... but if speed is your goal then that's how you do it. And that's how they do it.

Your computer has to run their special software which decompresses the download data. I'm not sure if they compress the upload stream or not since most cheapskate-internet users aren't big on uploading. AOL has been using mild (low-loss) compression for years to get faster apparent performance from dial-up connections.
 
I'm using the standard, $9.99 NetZero. I tried the high speed version for a month (actually a week, but I paid for a month) and it wasn't reliable in terms of conectivity. It was impressively quick, but wouldn't stay connected for more than 10 minutes most of the time.

Not worth it at all. I'm pretty happy with the standard NetZero service. It's fast enough and fairly stable. I use the free AVG antivirus software and don't have any problems.
 
I've got Juno which is NetZero's sister service and SpeedBand does work to improve speed. If you drop image quality it works even better, and for my largely text interests, this is no problem at all. I haven't had a real problem with it dropping the connection. It will shut off if I'm inactive for a long time.
 
On a standard dial up connection its not possible to get more than 56kbps data transfer speed, these high speed services will compress the data.

That does mean that your data will come down faster than without, as long as it isnt already compressed (eg. JPEG and ZIP files wont download much if any faster because they are already compressed) or they arent encrypted (compression often involves using a more efficient way of representing multiple identical strings, eg instead of writing 00000001111001 I could write 70412011, but encryption usually involves removing all patterns from data so the compression algorith cant compress it as it appears as a random data set)
 
Well, so far so good. It will compress images (jpeg, gif). Even though they are already compressed it will simply do so more. You can select the amount of extra compression you want.

It makes it a lot easier to view threads with tons of huge (file size) photos. You can see them well enough, but if you want to see the full quality image you simply select 'show full quality image' which you can do for one or all displayed photos.

So far the connection has been quite stable. I had been using wmconnect (wal-mart) but it was getting to the point of being really annoying with drop-off.

As for the question above about using a sattelite connection, I have heard of that but know absolutely nothing about it.
 
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