[X-Newbies] Dialup services

[Steven Rogers]

On Sep 23, 2005, at 9:56 AM, Michael Winter wrote:

> On Sep 23, 2005, at 12:12 AM, Steven Rogers wrote:
>
>>> • The same 56K dial-up with TurboMac Acceleration, for surfing up  
>>> to six times faster, as low as $7.41 per month
>>
>> So what the heck would this be? Can they really make the modem go  
>> any faster than its already going?
>
> I don't know if it was this service or another, but basically what  
> they do in compress everything before it is sent over the modem.  
> You have to have their software installed to do the decompression  
> on your side. Since the compression algorithm can compress data up  
> to 6 fold, you get up to 6x faster downloads. Note the words "up  
> to". I don't know what an average increase in speed would be.

I found some user info for the accelerator program, and it has a  
slider bar so that you can adjust the trade off between acceleration  
factor and "image quality" - so I infer that its doing destructive  
compression on images to get the speed. Ordinary compression won't  
work, as the modem protocols are already about the most sophisticated  
compression ever. Kind of a clever idea, but I think I'll skip that  
just for the sake of user simplicity.

SR