I'm looking into the possibility of either moving to Broadband for business purposes, but I came across an advert for OnSpeed, a piece of software that claims to make dial-up modems function 2 to 3 times as fast.

Has anyone used this or similar software or have any kind of insight into the claims the manufacturers make on its behalf?

The trick to this is that it is not really of much use unless you are thinking specifically in terms of hoping to speed up how you receive your email or any uncompressed content (ie: web pages or downloads that haven't already been compressed).

The page you should be looking at is this:
http://www.onspeed.com/en/help/pc/pre_purchase.php?id=2

Because your system will be receiving compressed content from the web you'll find that it works a bit harder to display everything for you and as you'll see on that page, it does absolutely nothing for you if you want to get regular downloads like zip files or installers as these tend to be compressed already.


As a result, my advice would be to go with broadband if you can get it as you'll find any small increase in costs will be far outweighed when compared to the cost of sitting twiddling your thumbs waiting for downloads to complete, etc...

Thanks for the advice on that score.

I'm a web developer and know a reasonable amount of how all this stuff works. Martin's quite right. Some web content has a lot of slack and can be compressed quite nicely, but that really only applies to text-only stuff.

.jpeg images, movie files, .zip .exe files and generally anything that's not text-based won't have much scope for compression. Some files (particulary jpegs and movies) tend to get slightly bigger when you try to compress them, so I doubt this software would even attempt to compress such data.

It's one of those "sounds too good to be true" things, IMO

So has anybody actually tried this stuff then?

yep, my folks live too far away to get bb so i gave it a try.

and for £24 it was a bargain.

i went on speed test and got the normal 33.6 Kb/s without and closer to 256Kb/s with it on.

obviously all the pages come through their server so there is a tiny delay there, but you can choose compression levels.

i.e. when set to highest the images on a sight appear no more than a pixelated mess but most of the time the images are not an issue to them.

you can do a trial so as not to waste £24 but i often recommend it to people who dont want to be paying £15 a month just to read emails and web pages faster.

the only problem arises with downloads for virus updates etc, still take a while

Thanks steve - it looks like it could be the best option for my parents who are planning to move house soon :thumbsup: