Dial-up Accelerator

[Pinnacle]

I have seen commercials recently from Net Zero in which they claim they can accelerate your dial up connection to up to five times normal dial up speed. Earthlink is making similar claims if you use their service and accelerator software. Anyone know anything about how (if) accellerator software works? I use Earthlink for dial-up and would be interested in better speed if I could trust that it was going to make a noticable difference without messing everything up.

Thanks.

[ilovetheusers]

Most likely Proxycon, Turbo Accelerator, Net Turbo or Propel or something like that. This explains how they operate: http://www.propel.com/ac/howitworks.jsp

They use compression of image/video files, caching and the like to speed things up a bit. You can get them for trial purposes on tucows.com or download.com. Give 'em a whirl and try them.

Honestly though, the best thing to accelerate dial up is to change the OS to ME, 2000 or XP. Way better tcp/ip stack and much faster connection.You can also try using multilink ppp (2 modems bound together by the OS) if you have 2 phone lines and your ISP supports it.

[eboyjones]

I have Juno which is Netzero. It works as stated above, but to make it really faster they put a icon in your system tray. When you dial up and make a connection a program, speed band, is activated. you can right it click in sys tray, go to setting and set your graphics settings with a slide bar. It goes from 256 colors to 4 colors. This doesn't change your adapter settings, but sets the colors on how you view web pages. Less color faster loading. 4 colors are pretty bad but in the middle 64-32 is not too bad. This helps a lot is you use a dial-up connection and live out in the rurals with a max 24k connection speed. Only other solution is satellite which is pretty expensive.

and it costs $4.95 more a month. But not too bad at $14.95 a month when you compare it to AOL which doesn't give you any faster connection speed in the sticks.

[Pinnacle]

Originally posted by eboyjones
I have Juno which is Netzero. It works as stated above, but to make it really faster they put a icon in your system tray. When you dial up and make a connection a program, speed band, is activated. you can right it click in sys tray, go to setting and set your graphics settings with a slide bar. It goes from 256 colors to 4 colors. This doesn't change your adapter settings, but sets the colors on how you view web pages. Less color faster loading. 4 colors are pretty bad but in the middle 64-32 is not too bad. This helps a lot is you use a dial-up connection and live out in the rurals with a max 24k connection speed. Only other solution is satellite which is pretty expensive.

and it costs $4.95 more a month. But not too bad at $14.95 a month when you compare it to AOL which doesn't give you any faster connection speed in the sticks.

This is the type of thing I was expecting. Perhaps they do compression too like ilovetheusers stated above, but probably the bulk of the "increase" they claim is by simply ignoring some of the graphic data. Someday, I want to get DSL, but I use the Internet so little at home, it is hard to justify the extra $10 per month and the effort of getting it. One of these days when my To Do list is a little shorter, I will get DSL. It's down to $29.95 in my area.

[ilovetheusers]

Originally posted by Pinnacle
This is the type of thing I was expecting. Perhaps they do compression too like ilovetheusers stated above, but probably the bulk of the "increase" they claim is by simply ignoring some of the graphic data. Someday, I want to get DSL, but I use the Internet so little at home, it is hard to justify the extra $10 per month and the effort of getting it. One of these days when my To Do list is a little shorter, I will get DSL. It's down to $29.95 in my area.

That is what I meant by compression. That's their term but ignoring data makes it sound less apealing.

The words [i[DSL[/i] and not worth the extra $10 per month should never go in the same sentence. You get a freed up phone line so you can make calls while on the net and if you had a decent connection for a change you might find yourself surfing at home a lot more.

[Shard92]

Originally posted by ilovetheusers
That is what I meant by compression. That's their term but ignoring data makes it sound less apealing.

The words [i[DSL[/i] and not worth the extra $10 per month should never go in the same sentence. You get a freed up phone line so you can make calls while on the net and if you had a decent connection for a change you might find yourself surfing at home a lot more.

While what you say is sound but he may be like me and just not at home enough with free time to be online with... A friend of mine has hi speed but he hardly gets to use it. His wife on the other hand does so it's worth it for them...( their kids are too young now but they'll be using it soon too I'm sure... )

I wish it was only $10 dollars more for me and then even the cheap-o me would get it.

[Pinnacle]

Yes, I agree that DSL is easily worth $29.95 per month, but I am not able to use the Internet much at home. My wife and I are on opposite schedules, so we are never home at the same time during the week. As a result, it is tough for me to sneak away to use the Internet because one of the girls is always in need of something. I suppose I should cherrish this time. Someday they will be teenagers, then it will not be cool to be within a hundred yards of me (but let's hope not).

[amcfreek]

W ell my ****ty isp is offering the propel right now for a free trial till christmas .. so i got it , i dont like running anny active x controls on my box so i shut them the f~k off . propel is a third party plugin . so i had to enable that for propel to work .. ok less security .. so i tried it now for a week but phone lines down here in the patch town {1 of the small coal mining towns of pa} everytime it rains and gets windy phones are un usable wires have been in place forever like the 1940's.. so getting a good connection is work on a good day!
.. i am like the guru on the block when it comes to dial strings ... www.modemhelp.org or www.modemhelp.net dial strings are an extra setting you can apply to youre SPECIFIC type of modem to tell it what to do rather then the default settings , where you get the 26.4 or 28.8 connection speed because youre 56k tried for something outside of the line noise .//bandwith limitation., it usually swings for the fence then the isp cuts it back to a safe default speed setting..
propel will help but a modems initialization strings usually works better then with just propel ...
the lucent/agire winmodems seam to be the ticket and are the eisiest , ive had my brothers rockwell based at an unrealiable 57.6
but for the past like 36 hours i havent had the internet reliably hooking up . infact i couldnt eaven hear the girl on the other end thier was so much static when i filed my complaint .. of course on thankxz givin/.when was the last time you got a 14.4 connection? or 19.2 then in 1 minut its like shut off .. or when yorue modems dialing out you cant hear it for the line noise ?
well anny way to make matters worse i try and get propel working on proxy to accell other things hwne that isnt working i shoot for ms dialup internet connection shareing and my 98 box freeks out .. so i uninstall propel ...
now it wont reinstall i have to contact my isp today ....

considering the lucent winmodem the easisest to hack and most reliable i have found on crap phone lines like i speak with experiance ive tried several and couldnt get out of he 20's
and yes ive tried usr only one actually outpreformed the lucent .. but it was isa controller type .

anny way for modem help on a lucent agire chipset i can give you the goto control panel , modems, then click youres and choose properties, then advanced , then in the extra settings box place a new command set , now this is trial and error , and sometimes you need to reeboot the box as it sometimes gets mad at this only a few machines ...
ok with v90 lucent agire paste this:
AT&FE s37=0 s38=1s44=23-v90=8 the last one -v90= number you can change that number from like 1 to 23 , max on crap phone lines use like a 10 11 or a 12 as a starting point increase till you cant connect to the internet and then back up 2 or 3 numbers .. the s37=0 tag disables 56kflex, the s38=1 controls v90 enable=1 dissable =0
now on a v92 agire i havent gotten as reliable as with the v90 settings but this actually helped a bit ..
AT&FE s37=0 s38=0 s91=11+MS= V92 +DCS = 1, 1 s+pqc=0
i cant eaven rememebr when i wrote this , but i knew what the numbers ment and i cant get the v92 to work as good as the v90 .. v92 offeres a better deal of compression ..

anny way im done rambling for the day i hope i helped a lil bit
btw dialup here is 15 a month then an extra 5 gets propel ., it does work i have seen it work .. it just doesent work outside youre browser http is it it mostly will not touch ftp . atleast i ahvenet got it to work through proxy /and its native proxy port 8080 ...
if i hack it i will let yas all know
cheers
amcfreek!