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Review Of Fast Dial Up Internet Offers

How Much Faster Is An Accelerated Dial Up Internet Connection?

The words “high speed” get thrown around a lot when discussing internet access. Internet service providers that offer broadband access claim to be high speed, but now it seems so do some dial up access providers. So is high speed dial up access as fast as broadband? Is high speed dial up really faster than normal dial up? The answers are no, and sort of.

Broadband connections use an entirely different method of accessing the Internet than dial up access. Broadband services are most often cable or DSL connections, and either have a larger pipe for information to travel through, or the fiber of the line is digital and has more bandwidth. Either way, you are using more than just a normal phone line connected to a dial up modem. These types of connections can go blazingly fast, with download speeds that can reach up to 5MB per second and even faster. Cable speeds tend to be the fastest at 6MB in some areas.

High speed dial up, such as Netzero, uses the same technology as standard dial up, with only a couple of additions. The two major differences in dial up over high speed dial up are compression and caching.

 

Dial Up Compression

Compression methods all attempt to take large data files and make them smaller. WinZip is software that many are familiar with that compresses files on your computer down to more reasonable sizes. Data packet compression works the same way, and is a reliable method to speed up information transfers via dial up connections.

Compression isn’t a miracle speed fix, and it isn’t anywhere near the speed of broadband access. Some services allow you to set your level of compression. The higher the compression level, the less defined the graphics become. At the highest settings, web graphics tend to fuzzy and ill defined. The speed increase is noticeable when downloading a web page, but the sacrifice can be high.

Compression occurs on a server level, but you need additional software to decompress what you are downloading. One major ISP that offers this type of compression is NetZero, and the software you need can be ordered or downloaded. It should only take a few moments to install, and once configured works in the background and doesn’t interfere with downloads.

 

Dial Up Caching

Your computer currently has a memory cache set up for Internet data. When you go to web sites, all of the pictures and pages that you download go in this cache. As the cache fills up to its maximum allowance, older data is dropped and replaced by new data.

You can see your cache at work when you click on the Back button on your browser. You will notice that the page loads much faster than it did the first time you went there. This is because the data is stored on your computer and is being called from memory as opposed to being downloaded a second time. Pages that you visit frequently will stay cached longer.

The second method some ISP’s use in speeding up your dial up connection is to increase the cache size your computer has set for internet data. An example of this can be seen in Earthlink’s high speed dial up service, and the available setting are from 20MB to 2GB of cache.

This doesn’t actually speed up your dial up access, but it can appear to do so. Most people go to the same sites again and again over time. If most of each site is already on your computer, the downloaded changes can go very fast. If you already have the graphics of a large site on your computer for example, all you would need to pull down would be the text, and this would be fast.

High speed dial up can be faster than normal dial up. Compression does speed up your downloads but the price to be paid is quality of graphics. Increased caching will only speed your experience up over time, and doesn’t actually make your downloads any faster. Keep this in mind while shopping for a dial up ISP.

 
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