What exactly is "OnSpeed"?

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Marie

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Does anyone know what this is? 'OnSpeed' has had advertisements in the weekend supplements offering "broadband speeds for £24.99 a year". "You buy it off the web and it starts straight away. There is no need to change your ISP or email settings, no new equipment, no engineers and you keep your existing phoneline...a quick easy software download that works by using superior compression technology developed by NASA to help data travel faster.......5 times faster than normal dial-up connection................unlike broadband OnSpeed is also portable; installed on a laptop or Pocket PC it works anywhere in the world.......it costs just £2.08 a month with no set-up fee or contract"

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As I am just about to spend quite a lot of money on a wireless router to link my laptop and home p.c. I am interested but can't understand what 'it' actually is. Anyone know?
 
Re: .......but what IS it?

It's a proxy/cache. Your internet traffic is routed through OnSpeed's server (along with other customers). You stand to experience improved browsing speeds over a dial-up line but regular downloads typically aren't improved. The idea is that you're sharing this cache of pages with other people so the chances are the page you're looking for is on OnSpeed's server and it gets pulled from there instead of from the actual site that the page is hosted on.
 
Re: .......but what IS it?

[broken link removed] explains and reviews OnSpeed in case that helps.
 
This is really helpful - thank you! I don't think it's worth bothering with dial-up again and the speeds are not impressive; I just want it for picking up and sending e-mails and accessing documents I currently download on my p.c.

n associated question. I have broadband on my home p.c. and am about to buy a wireless router so I can access documents e-mail etc. (academic work so I'm not at present interested in the quality of graphics) on my laptop for use when travelling or taking it to work without transferring documents via memory-stick.

However many of the places I hang out are universities and hospital departments with 'universal broadband available' which I've never used. At a seminar in a Boston college recently I was told I 'didn't need any modems, connectors or ISP service providers' but could 'just plug into the network'.

Is this true? If I bring my laptop to a university which has 'universal broadband' is it just a matter of going on-line? It seems too good to be true.
 
Re: 'just plug into the network'...

Afaik, the IT section of the relevant institution would need to provide you with a guest a/c (username+password), and you should be able to connect at any LAN point - or wirelessly, if they have a wireless network (as in e.g. DCU/TCD).
 
be careful my friend tried this on his dial up with no success
 
oulu said:
be careful my friend tried this on his dial up with no success
Click to expand...

It's supposed to compress data between the OnSpeed server and the Net and transfer the data to you in compressed form.

It also caches pages that don't change often (static content).

So, it depends on what type of browsing you do and what types of sites you visit, whether you will notice any improvement.

Note that Google launched then a Google Accelerator service due to privacy issues.

I suspect that these things are not a patch on real broadband, but the price is certainly good. A colleague in work ("Q") uses OnSpeed and swears by it.
 
I bought this also, its ok but I eventually uninstalled it. It does make a noticeable difference when you are browsing around for text based websites. Sometimes it didnt work as "Onspeed could not find its server" but this didnt cause any issues, you just carry on browsing without it.

The only reason I stopped using it was because I found myself turning it on and off as I browsed. With it turned on any pictures\graphics on websites were "blurry" - this is because the onspeed server reduces the quality of them in order to make them downloaded quicker on your PC.

Overall it probably worth it for 40 euro but if you have diallup then there isnt much you can do to speed that up. Get broadband for any real difference.
 
I see on a new thread someone was asking about Onspeed well I've updated this thread to give my experience. I was having problems with my broadband and needed my PC for a job and got Onspeed to improve speed with dialup (before buying a new PC). It definitely sped up my downloading. The speed increases are best for Text-based or Upstreaming (as much as 8 times) Graphics would be slower at about a speed increase of 1.61, which gives an average of about 3.81. Someone mentions about graphics quality above, well this can be changed in the settings menu. If you want quicker downloads, you can alter the Image Quality.

Now my broadband has been fixed and Onspeed improves speeds also. I now have 2 pcs, one old (smaller processor and smaller RAM & Onspeed) and one new (bigger processor & Memory). Cant see difference between performance of old, with Onspeed and new without BUT old pc with Onspeed is definitely quicker with Onspeed & broadband than Broadband without Onspeed. So if you have dialup, I would definitely recommend ONspeed. With IOL increasing speeds this weekend, you may not need it if you already have broadband - unless you have an old PC. Hope this is of help.
 
If you have broadband then I can't see what advantage OnSpeed would provide. If you are on dial-up then OnSpeed may give marginal increases in perceived speed (at the cost of some loss of data - e.g. image quality etc.) but I can't see it ever approaching the speed of any broadband package. It's simply not physically possible to make a 56Kbps link operate like a 512Kbps+ one. If you have dial-up and want to speed up browsing then other free options like switching off the downloading/display of certain content (e.g. images, Java applets, ActiveX components etc.) could help.
 
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