onSpeed, Speed up your Internet

Pleas Note: Since this article was published, browsers and networks have greatly improved, even mobile internet reaches speeds that were unheard of at the time I wrote this.

If you still need a form of speeding up your internet, I would recommend the Opera Browser, it has a bult in speed optimiser named 'Opera Turbo'. Not only that, but it's probably the best and fastest browser out there, and it's free!

Is onSpeed useful for the analogue surfers? If you are living in Ireland there is a good chance that you are still surfing the Internet with a slow analogue modem connection like me (56Kbps). Even in Dublin where I am living there are still areas where a broadband connection is not yet available. So a service that offers you 'Near Broadband' speeds via a modem connection sounds pretty good.

When I first heard about onSpeed I thought, 'OK, another sound too good to be true story', but I had read a few good things about it and decided to give it a try.

So, deciding that I could lose 40 euro on a gamble I got out my credit card and purchased a license for onSpeed's Service.

Basically the onSpeed works like this:

• A Service (onSpeedCore.exe) is started on your machine
• When you request a website your browser routes to this service
• A connection is made to an onSpeed Server which retrieves the web page for you
• The page is compressed according to your settings and sent to your computer
• The service running on your computer decompresses the page and sends it to your browser

After using this service for a few hours it was obvious that there was a definite speed increase. You can set the picture quality settings yourself, the lower the quality the better the surfing speed, but the lower you go the worse they get, to the point of being barely legible.

To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised by the performance, BUT, I mainly read news articles and participate in newsgroups. If you mainly use the Internet to look at pictures, watch movies or download music then onSpeed is definitely not for you. Why? Because images, Mp3's and movies are already compressed and cannot be compressed any further than they already are by the onSpeed servers.

Also, if you have image quality set to extremely low, it can be a pain to have to refresh the page when there is an image that you do want to see in all it's glory. You'll have to change the settings to high and the refresh the page again.

Conclusion:

onSpeed is a great product if you cannot get a high speed internet connection, it even helps if you are surfing with a broadband connection, but the difference will not be as noticable. I would definitely recommend this to anyone that wants to speed up their surfing. Just don't expect any miracles :)