Broadband 3 times faster?

[starbuck]

Have a look at this:

http://www.onspeed.com/en/index.php

Saw it advertised in stuff magazine. Anyone used this, any good?

[skuzgib]

A friend of the family who lives on a narrowboat uses this - he connects to t'intarweb using his mobile - something like 11kbps

He reckons it's like using a 56k or near enough connection, so it does work. Only for net + e-mail i believe thoght.

[Scarlet Infidel]

What it does is whenever you request a web page it will download the page on their servers, compress all the images to the degree you choose and then send the newly compressed (ie visually poor if you want it heavily compressed) site on to you.

[autopilot]

I use Onspeed because i am stuck on a 56k dial up connection. While thier claim of dialup being 10 times faster (broadband speed) is not that realistic, it does make a big difference to my web browsing (especially on text heavy sites like hexus and these forums). I would say it averages to from 3-5 times faster, which for £25 for a whole year is very good value for money and a godsend for people like me.

You only notice the differnece in quality on photos and images, the rest of the site (text etc) will look exactly the same. But you can set what compression level/quality you want and can hardly nocice the differnece until you start compressing the images heavly.

But it does have some issues. I find when i have muliple pages open it can get 'stuck' and only load half the page data before having to wait ages/forever for the rest of the page to load. A quick refeash or just making sure i don't have too many windows/tabs open at once usually sorts it. There also times when it slows down a little at peek times (which i guess is when thier proxy compression servers are busy), but generally it a very good service and i would not be with out it while i am on 56k and wholely recommend it to anyone in my position (or on ISDN). It works with email too.

There is one other thing that Onspeed is amazing for - people who pay for thier connection by the megabyte. If you are a mobile user with a laptop/PDA/mobile phone (yes, you can set all these devices up at no extra cost) and connection the internet which uses GPRS/3G you will find that by using onspeed you will nearly half the amount of data being sent over your connection. I read a good article my the editor of PC Pro magazine. He using it on all his mobile devices and reckons he has halved his data bills. Yes, halved and even more if you turn on image blocking!

[UltraMagnus]

only works for webpages, so its crap in other words?

[autopilot]

only works for webpages, so its crap in other words?

Why would that make it crap? Thats exactly what it's desgined for (and email).

In fact it works much better than you would think until you have tried it. Plus it can also save you a lot of money if you use a PDA/Mobile/laptop over GPRS/3G. It's a real lifeline for people like me who can't get broadband.

Here are some example statistics;

After a bit of browsing the Hexus fourms;

Original Data (which it would have been without Onspeed) - 1,328 KB

Compressed Data (with Onspeed running) - 306 KB

Thats a speed increase of 4.34*. Now imagine you were a mobile user paying for GPRS or 3G by the megabyte?


*When they say speed increase, they are actually stating the comression ratio. You also have to take into account the compression process overheads of thier severs (i.e the time takes to compress the data before sending it on again). But this is pretty nomimal because slow speed of the dial up connection anyway. A compression ratio of 4.34 probably equates to a real world increase of around times 3. I'm not sure of the exact figures and there are other factors, but still pretty impressive i think you will agree.


EDIT: I now see Onspeed have changed thier claim of dial-up 5 times faster, rather than the 10 times faster they used to claim, which is far more realistic.