Onspeed

finnpark

Can any1 tell me if OnSpeed fast internet program works? Is it good value at E40? www.onspeed.com Thanks

L5

finnpark wrote:

Can any1 tell me if OnSpeed fast internet program works? Is it good value at E40? www.onspeed.com Thanks

Heres a good review of it


"We have to admit to being more than a little cynical about services that claim to “speed up your internet connection”. After promises of body part enlargement and miracle hair restorers, it’s a regularly spotted phrase in our spam mailbox. Since bandwidth has a finite capacity and we’ve never seen anything that actually works before, OnSpeed’s claim of speeding dial-up connections to near-broadband levels, at a fraction of the price, sound like the shallow promise of a charlatan selling snake oil. We were invited to put it to the test. So we did.

Features
Whereas most internet speed improvers get their minor benefits out of tweaking settings here and there for incremental benefit, OnSpeed uses US military grade data compression to dramatically squeeze down the content of websites before it gets to you. As we well know, smaller files make quicker downloads, but it does necessitate a downward shift in the quality of things like the images you see.

Performance
In our tests, we got a vastly improved performance out of certain types of downloads. The best performance is on web pages made entirely of text and pictures. However, this doesn’t come without compromise. We set the speed improvement to a sympathetic setting, which was improving our speed by about 3.5 times. At this setting, images are visibly degraded, with blurring and that muddy pixelisation you often see around the edges of compressed photos. It is possible to crank the compression up even more for greater speed, but we thought this impacted on our enjoyment of the web and was a poor compromise. Also, it doesn’t do much to improve streaming media or sites heavily laden with snazzy technologies like Flash.

Ease of use
Thankfully, all the hardcore technical stuff is done for you. Installing OnSpeed is easy and you just have to decide whether you want it switched on and, if so, how much compression you want to apply. This is controlled by a simple slider bar and a graphical representation will show you how it’s likely to affect your images.

Value for money
This is no rip-off – it actually works and is good value too. There’s no point pretending it’s a good replacement for broadband because it’s not in the same league. However, it isn’t in the same league as regards price either. So if you live in an area that can’t receive broadband or simply aren’t willing to pay the premium pricing, this is a cheap way of accelerating your browsing.


Verdict
Broadband has many benefits. It’s always on, it speeds up your entire internet experience, and it’s quicker to start when you turn your computer on. OnSpeed, despite its impressive capabilities, can’t do all this. However, a product that can improve the speed of your dial-up connection by 3.5 times, without losing too much image quality, is nothing to sniff at. "

galwaydude18

Ya it does speed up your internet connection but it plays havoc with images! i cancelled my order with them after trying it for a few days because i couldn't put up with bad image display with it! it your own preference as to wether or not you can put up with bad image display and faster connections to the net! i personally couldn't put up with the bad image display!

finnpark

Thanks for reply.

Im still in 2 minds. Is there any free services that does a similar job?.

Ciaran500

I doubt there are any free ones as there is quite alot of power required to compress everything before its sent to you so would require alot of funding.

Mutant_Fruit

In my opinion, you shouldn't bother. Its $40 you could spend elsewhere and get more benefit.

Are you on 56k? That would be the only place where it might be even considared useful. All this program will increase is webpage browsing, nothing else. Downloading mp3's nad your favourite TV episodes will still take the same amount of time. As will game updates etc.

yop

Lads

I got this over the weekend, I have a great line at home with a superb 12k - 14.5k connection speed, now I know some of you will say I have a near broadband speed but I said I would try it, I have to admit I am very happy, the images are very poor which is true but feck it you should not be looking at po*n anyway

Seriously though if you want to check and send email without waiting for a decade and surf for infor and are not bothered about images then I would really recommend this.

Slan

jessy

Ya i got OnSpeed during the summer before i got BB, i doesn’t speed up your connection as some people have said. It’s not supposed to, it just sends the page you requested to you in a compressed format, (That’s why the images look a bit funny), its descent for general surfing, Note it will not increase the speed of any other downloads apart from Images and Text.