[ILUG] Faster internet connections - is this real?

[Niall O Broin]

On 24 May 2005, at 15:02, Kevin Philp wrote:

> As anyone seen this company that claims their software speeds up your 
> internet
> connection by vast amounts? They also claim it works under wine on 
> Linux and
> have a section on their webpage about how to set it up although they 
> don't
> officially support linux.
>
> http://www.onspeed.com/en/index.php
>
> What I don't understand is:
> 1. How does a piece of software on your desktop speed up your 
> connection?
> Surely the server has to run the compression software?
>
> 2. Can't Apache negotiate to compress web pages anyway? Is this 
> software just
> adjusting the content negotiation?


My brother, who'd be a fairly typical clueless Windows dialup user, 
signed up for this. He initially thought it was worthwhile but having 
started to have problems, he has given up using it, so that may say all 
that needs to be said.

What onspeed does is it installs a local proxy server, and reconfigures 
your browser to use that proxy. That contacts an onspeed server, which 
compresses the content. One way it wins bigtime is to compress (on its 
servers) large image files - it's a crying shame how many people use 
images on web sites which are WAY WAY bigger than they need to be. Mind 
you, with onspeed's max image compression setting, the images are 
barely recognisable.



Niall