Search
Recommended Products
Related Links


 

 

Informative Articles

Lockspam for Outlook Version 2.0 is Available Now!
For Immediate Release Polesoft declares birth of its new edition of Lockspam! 12th May, 2004: Polesoft Inc., the world's professional developer of anti spam software, today announced its new "Lockspam for Outlook" Version 2.0 is available....

Maps of Cyberspace
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the...

RSS Reader Is A Life Raft Saving Us From Getting Lost In A Sea Of Useless Information
One of the main problems with the Internet these days is the fact that there is so much information out there; it can be quite hard to find the particular knowledge that you’re looking for. It can often feel like you’re surfing waves of thick...

w3IDE NexGen Edition - Building a Better Web
BanPro NET [Bannon Productions - www.w3ide.com] announced on Monday, March 21, 2005 the release of w3IDE NexGen Edition. This is a major upgrade to the w3IDE (World Wide Web Integrated Development Environment) software title. Scott Bannon, owner of...

Where To Look For Dirt-Cheap DVD Software. Part VII
DVD Ghost is a very useful utility to make your DVD play/copy/backup software restriction-free, and it also supports copy/backup DVD to hard disk. It is light on your system resources and resides in system tray. It removes all kinds...

 
Google
A Cheap Alternative To Broadband?

Are you a dial-up user looking for a faster connection, but don't like Broadband prices? If so, you should take a look at a new service called OnSpeed, which has received rave reviews in Internet technology publications.

What OnSpeed does is to re-route web pages and email via its own servers, compressing the data on the fly prior to sending it onwards to your PC. A small program then decompresses the data, so that you can view it in the normal way via your browser or email client.

In my own dial-up tests, with a modem running at a nominal 49kb/s I appeared to get speeds close to that of my normal broadband connection of 598 kb/s - very impressive. Image quality is often reduced but the compression for this can be improved, though with an adverse effect on the speed of course.

Also some file types like MP3 cannot yet be compressed. The company is working on these issues however and expects to find solutions soon.

Unfortunately I was unable to use email in my tests, due to a 'port' conflict with a spam filter that I was using. The standard advice on the OnSpeed site for such cases is to disable the
offending program. Not a constructive approach - to say the least - so I hope that the relevant instructions will be changed soon.

More significantly, the problem persisted even when I switched off the OnSpeed application on my PC; in the end I had to remove the program to get


the spam filter working again. I expect that this fault can be resolved, but clearly there are issues in this area that need to be addressed.

The software is easy to install, and is available for Mac as well as Windows PCs. On the whole the service is surprisingly good, and a lot cheaper than broadband. Unlike other 'speed-up'
techniques that tweak your computer's settings but result in little noticeable improvement, OnSpeed really works.

I can recommend OnSpeed for dial-up users who can't justify the expense of broadband, or who are not located close enough to a suitable exchange. OnSpeed is also stated to be great for mobile or PDA users, as GPRS (wireless) speeds can be boosted by as much as 8 times. It even helps with broadband if you can only get a reduced service in your area.

My overall rating is 4/5 - very good, but the email support needs to be improved.

If you want further details of OnSpeed, please visit http://www.On-Speed.net There is a 14 day money-back guarantee, so you can try the service without any risk.

Copyright © Richard Prosser 2004

About the Author

Richard is a software developer and entrepreneur, and may be contacted via the 'Article Tips' site given below. This article may be published without permission, but only in its entirety.

Free email course: "Drive 'Hot' Prospects To Your Site For Free!"
http://www.ArticleTips.com