My father lives in an area that has no Broadband access.

I have heard that there is a service that one can subscribe to that will speed dial-up internet access, but I can not recall it's name.

Does anybody have any recommendations and/or comments?

As always, thanks in advance.

Scottie Dog

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

Getting great reviews in various magazines (pc format etc) and only £2 a month extra. I trialled it even though I'm on broadband and even then it made a huge difference. Quality stuff.

I'm using earthlink.net which seems quite good. It has an accelerator for the graphics, how would this overall acceleration fit in with that?

Also, my dial up connection is suspect. Most times the prog reports 45.3 kbs but diags show 35.6 -- is this typical? LR

FunkyMunky, is it possible for you to quantify the difference in terms if Kb/min, etc? Then we can meaningfully compare the difference between it and normal dialup and broadband...

It was a while ago so forgive my dodgy memory but I recall that in terms of kb/sec, where I could normally pull 300kilobytes/sec from a UK Server (on 3mbit broadband), with onspeed enabled I was able to achieve download speeds up around 550kb/sec. This is well above the theoretical limit of a 3MB connection, 3MB = 3072 kilobits = 384 kb/sec and works out as an "onspeed" speed about 43% larger than my original speed.

The speed increase should appear more significant for 56k users and where download speeds were 7-10kb/sec before you should see around 30-50 kb/sec. This is a massive improvement, and could be compared to turning your 56k modem into roughly 280k "middleband".

The official word on onspeed is that it is up to 5x faster for dial up, and based on the reviews I've seen you should little have reason to doubt them

Scottie,

If you do a PPRuNe 'search' for 'Onspeed' in this forum, you'll find a few more comments, including one, posted about last July, which gives a link to a free 7 day trial. I took advantage of it a few days ago, and I'm quite impressed.

BT are allegedly enabling our local exchange for Broadband next month, otherwise I would definitely be signing up for Onspeed.

So how does it work then

You can't operate any faster than your connection allows.
Are we talking about connection or transfer speeds ?

Regards
FBW

Its all down to compression. I've used the trial, and can honestly say that for browsing, it is at least as quick as my new 256k broadband connection.

Trouble is, it doesn't work for downloads, and you can't use the phone at the same time!!!

timmcat,

Just to clarify, if you use Onspeed with Broadband, can you still use the phone at the same time?

Thanks for the link to the free trial, I believe it was you who posted it last year.

Don't see why not, but if you are on 512k Broadband (or above), I don't think you will get any benefit from Onspeed.

Just wanted to say thanks to you guys for your input.

Much appreciated. Funny how having asked the question I then found an advert for OnLine in the Sunday paper that same day - typical!!

Cheers

Scottie Dog

Just finished a free 7 day trial and decided to purchase. Very impressed with the speed increase for text and bulletin board type work. Graphics not so great, tend to be blocky at max speed settings, but these can be improved by reducing speed.

I bought it primarily to speed up my connection when travelling with my lap top, as none of the hotels we stay at have high speed internet access.

Works by your request going to their server ,which retrieves it for you, compresses it and sends it to your computer, where the software decompresses it.

If you can get broadband pay the extra, if not a very credible alternative.