Internet Advice Please

scam

Thanks for the quick and direct response!

quote:

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Originally posted by Martin D:
My dad just rang pointing out this:
http://www.onspeed.com/en/index.php
He wants to sign up, does anyone use this out there? Or any comment would be welcome.
Not really sure
Martin

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Well, having a read of their website it isn't magic. Instead of you downloading X, they download X, compress it then you download compressed X from them. You are still downloading at the same old speed. Some things are compressed anyway so it won't always make a difference.

I don't think it is a scam as I've seen adverts for them in some large nation papers, and those aren't cheap, plus you can't invent reviews from the computer press as you tend to get sued.

Whether the money would be better spent on a decent ISP or broadband is a different question though?

Paul

I've been using onspeed for over a year on a dial up connection after rave reviews in the computer press. It works for me.

Bob

It's not a scam and the techniques they are using do work up to a point. Basically, all modern browsers can decompress compressed files sent to them in real time and as long as your processor is up to it, you won't notice any difference. That said, they only have a market to serve because not all sites implement compression on their web servers. It's perfectly easy to do this and for web servers that employ this compression I suspect there will be no net benefit and probably a small slowdown due to routing through their servers. The benefit comes from the fact that most sites probably don't deploy this technology.

If the content you are viewing is mainly text, css etc then you can get up to 90% compression. For a typical site with images included it will be more like 50% and if you are downloading mainly compressed data - .gif, .jpg, .zip there is little or no benefit because this data is hard to compress much further.

Regards
Steve

quote:

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It's not a scam and the techniques they are using do work up to a point.

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no? For anything that 'needs' broadband it doesn't work - ie videos, graphics, large downloads etc. Anything else loads more than fast enough even at 56K, so what exactly is the point?

If the content you are viewing is mainly text, css etc then you can get up to 90% compression.

That would be the point.

Regards
Steve

As I've said, if it's mainly text then you can already download it faster than you can read it, so what's the point? Still if you want to pay someone a couple of quid a month so you can download text files up to *90%* quicker then be my guest.