An alternative to Broadband....
 

Found out about this in a paper at the weekend. Seems pretty good and worth a try at £2 per month instead of £10+

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

Been using it for about a month, brilliant. Doesn't work on Mpegs or music downloads yet, but they are working on it.
Surfing and email is really quick and you can adjust the compression rate to suit the quality of pictures you want. You can download it on a 7 day free trial here http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/Onspe...-10293068.html

Anyone else got this?
The rating on the download site for it is 50 - 50 at the moment but I might be interested if its as good as the box says?

Cant get Broadband in my village, lucky to keep electric for a full week at the moment and we live within 10 miles of three power stations too, go figure.

It works with Broadband as well !!!

And seems pretty damn good far...need to do some proper speed tests next - but well done!

Just seen an advert in the Daily Mirror as well 2day as luck would have it.

Cheers - Frank

The only problem with this is that it's no more than a compression system which reduces the file size to get it down the line quicker.

Great! You say ... why doesn't everything work like that?

Well, it takes time to compress the file before it's sent over the wire, and then it needs to be decompressed when it gets to the other end. This takes time, so it could actually make your internet connection *slower* in some circumstances.

The other problem of course is that a lot of internet content is *already* compressed - jpg images, media files like MP3s and video, and so on. You can't get any more compression into something if it's already been compressed (efficiently!).

Given that most of the stuff you download over broadband is going to be images, music and video ... there doesn't seem to be much attraction to me.

What I can't work out is why you'd pay a tenner a month for it! If you're already paying for an ISP and spending about a tenner a month, then add another tenner a month and you've already got the price of a broadband connection which you can use 24/7 with unlimited download and a much, much higher connection speed.

It's a great idea and I'm sure it works, but it whiffs of snake oil if you ask me...

:borg:

Sorry forgot to add my bit....

Totally agree you you Antonye. The other thing is one of the benifits of Broadband it frees up your phone line. With this you still can't use the phone, if you only have one line.

Oh yes - completely forgot about that too!

It's only Two Quid a month Antonye, horses for courses, I only go on line evenings/weekends from home so, with my Wanadoo ISP + Onspeed only costs me about Twelve quid a month, so I can't justify broadband at it's current price.

Also...surely if you know your machine and the software that's on it that should speed up your connection whether broadband or dial up...
Pop up dummy...Adaware..hijackthis...and the like will help you to speed up and weed out some of the Cr4p off your machine.
The most common culprits of slow speed are HBOs (helper Browser objects) that are designed by helpful software peeps to help you but things like spyware utilize them.
Learn about your machine I say....:)
Oh! and defrag' regularly.....:smug: