View Full Version : Are dial-up accelerators gimmicks?
Treason
06-09-05, 02:45 PM
I'm forced to cancel my cable internet because they think I'm "abusing" my bandwidth and are telling me to sign up for "business account" cable internet access for an extra paltry $50 a month on top of regular $40 home access.
So regular dial-up will cost me $9.50 a month, but they are offering a $12 deal that includes their "dial-up accelerator!" which claims up to 5x the speed of regular dial-up.
Without looking at the fine print, I know that the big asterisk on that 5x means only at certain webpages with certain content. So does this make it a gimmick? Any point of paying $2.50 extra if I'm actually downloading some large file or playing online?
Good question, I have wondered about this myself, do they accelerate downloads or just webpages?
Total gimmick. Dial-up transfer download will never be faster than 53k on any thing. Upload is even worse at about 32k I think.
What the accelerator does is cache the pages and associated images so that they load faster. The only way I would see it work is if a site you are trying to visit is very busy.
Gaming and large file tranfers will still be terribly slow and high ping as well.
Roliath
06-09-05, 04:38 PM
I'm forced to cancel my cable internet because they think I'm "abusing" my bandwidth and are telling me to sign up for "business account" cable internet access for an extra paltry $50 a month on top of regular $40 home access.
Can you explain "abusing" your bandwidth?
Can you explain "abusing" your bandwidth?
Seeding a few dozen torrents. lol
the accelorator isnt what i would call a total gimmick .... there just playing with tcp achnowledments if i understand it correctly. thats how there getting the speed boosts. and throw in there some major compression and you have less overhead.. but the latency is still there... why dont you cancel your account and have a friend or relative restart the account in a few weeks.
ricercar
06-09-05, 06:14 PM
My ISP has a dialup accelerator that's essentially a cache or proxy server, as I understand it. http://www.sonic.net/support/accelerator/
I use DSL so I cannot address its viability.
Starscream
06-09-05, 06:39 PM
Something else a lot of the "accelerators" do in addition to caching the content of popular sites is compress it more. The difference can be pretty noticable on some images in a few of the comparisons I've seen.
1337_Like_ThaT
06-09-05, 09:57 PM
Tr1ck is right in his initial post. dial-up accelerators do use methods of caching specific websites to boost load up speeds. However, I do know for a fact accelerators do not work in Encrypted webpages and do not affect download/upload speeds at all. So all the AOL and Netzero accelerators that are promoted on TV are really not 1/2 as good as what they say they are
Here is a good link to answer your questions about high-speed dial-up
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/high-speed.htm
Treason
06-10-05, 05:05 AM
Thanks for the info folks. It's only $2.50 extra and my family does visit popular news sites quite a bit, so I'll bite.
As for secure web pages, I take it that username : password login required websites are under that category and thus not accelerated, but .jpg's and .gif's shown on such sites are accelerated?
As for abuse, mix in a university student renter who uses bittorrent, a little brother who uses newsgroups, and myself who uses Direct Connect and you get 4 consecutive suspensions from the bandwidth po-po resulting in a indefinite ban. Limit was 50 GB upload/download per month (Those users in Sweden are so lucky!).
Thanks for the info folks. It's only $2.50 extra and my family does visit popular news sites quite a bit, so I'll bite.
As for secure web pages, I take it that username : password login required websites are under that category and thus not accelerated, but .jpg's and .gif's shown on such sites are accelerated?
As for abuse, mix in a university student renter who uses bittorrent, a little brother who uses newsgroups, and myself who uses Direct Connect and you get 4 consecutive suspensions from the bandwidth po-po resulting in a indefinite ban. Limit was 50 GB upload/download per month (Those users in Sweden are so lucky!).
You get a limit on your bandwidth still in the US??? lol and then they still have the nerve to charge you big $$
Mind you I wouldn't say I download/upload more than your household, but just checking my Azureus stats, in 74 days I've DL 282GB and UL 172GB, so I am very thankfull that there are no limits here in France at least....because that would really suck, prices here are also only €15/mth for 6-8Mbit!
1337_Like_ThaT
06-10-05, 08:23 PM
:p You get a limit on your bandwidth still in the US??? lol and then they still have the nerve to charge you big $$
Mind you I wouldn't say I download/upload more than your household, but just checking my Azureus stats, in 74 days I've DL 282GB and UL 172GB, so I am very thankfull that there are no limits here in France at least....because that would really suck, prices here are also only €15/mth for 6-8Mbit!
Wow, that sure is alot of Pr0n to be moving around every month! :p
If it is provided by your ISP then it will be slightly faster then the default dialup. The telephone line's data transfer rate is fixed, but your ISP zips/compress's the packets and then sends it to you.
Treason
06-14-05, 04:26 AM
:p
Wow, that sure is alot of Pr0n to be moving around every month! :p
Hey guys! I just downloaded 60 mb in 3 hours! I r teh winnar! :eek:
You get a limit on your bandwidth still in the US??? lol and then they still have the nerve to charge you big $$
Mind you I wouldn't say I download/upload more than your household, but just checking my Azureus stats, in 74 days I've DL 282GB and UL 172GB, so I am very thankfull that there are no limits here in France at least....because that would really suck, prices here are also only €15/mth for 6-8Mbit!
Links please.
Nedzalife
07-02-05, 12:56 AM
The only truth behind 5x faster dialup is that some of the webpages are stored on the ISPs local proxy server, and through v.90 data compression, stream it faster to your PC based on those two principles.
As for online gaming and viewing pages that are not cached on the ISP's server, no, you won't notice much of a difference. The v.90 compression helps some, but not enough to make a noticable difference.
Yeah like everyone says accels are just a way of caching pages so they load faster.
Why dont you just sign up with a new isp? Or better yet. dont upload so much?
Its great ur a seeder not a leecher. But if it was me, i wouldnt go back to dialup. Ever since ive switched to broadband ive been asking myself "Why the hell didnt i do this earlier" :D
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