OnSpeed - any views?

gabriella

gabriella

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Hi all

In today's Daily Express (for those not in the UK - national Sunday newspaper) there was an advert for OnSpeed which claims be a BB connection costing £24.99 per year and claims good reviews with PC Advisor and Computer Active and says that it has 1000,000 satisfied customers.

www.onspeed.com

Has anyone heard of them - what do people think about this? It sounds very cheap to be honest.

Any thoughts welcome!!

Gabrielle x
 
I'm very suspicious about the way this works - I assume it uses some sort of compression technology to work (kind of as a proxy server). If you view image intensive sites, this may well speed your internet connection up a bit - but 5x faster seems quite alot. File downloads, music and videos will not download any faster - but general surfing may well :)

Its a pity they don't offer a 1 month trial!
 
Be cearful ... it NOT an ISP, as I first thought, but a program. :confused:

ONSPEED is the solution for millions of Internet users who are frustrated by having a slow Internet connection and is a real alternative to Broadband.

ONSPEED is a software download which utilises a unique 9 patent approved compression technology that increases your existing Internet connection speed by up to 5 times.
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Frankly, I cannot see how ANY software can ACTUALLY SPEED-UP a dial-up connection.

:rolleyes:
 
I have never heard of them before. but Sir Mucks is rite there is no physical way of speeding up a standard 56k modem to five times the speed. that is simply crazy and impossible.

it just is not possible!

And thanks for sharing this with us Grabiella. I would not read the Daily Express myself, its too professional for me, I stick to my News of the world and The Sun!!:)
 
For example, OnSpeed reduced the download time for the image-heavy www.b3ta.com from a hopeless two minutes 15 seconds to an unacceptable 90 seconds. However, bear in mind that the system works by compressing the graphics, reducing their quality. This doesn't matter on the majority of sites, where the graphics have no useful function, but it may matter if you want to look at the pretty pictures. If so, OnSpeed has a slider control letting you increase the quality level and so reduce the speed.
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dont like sound of that!
 
There have been many tiny tweaks and small programs in the past which always claimed higher speeds but none really worked to make a big difference in real sense. The only program that I found helped somewhat was the TCPOptimiser which actually improves the speed and is also free. It also tweaks all other type of connections including broadband, DSL, Lan and as mentioned Dial-Up.

Program Features

TCP Optimizer is a program for tweaking broadband-related Registry settings. Optimize Dialup, DSL and Cable all from one simple to use interface. (It has the option to return your Registry to its default untweaked state as well) It also includes built in MaxMTU and Latency(Ping) detection utilities.

TCP Optimizer
 
So guys.....

In summary are you saying give this one a miss??

On the face of it - sounds to good yo be true. I have cut the advert out and have at home - it does say sotware not compatible with AOL browsers whatever that means and claims to have rave reviews!!

Gabriella x
 
Bless you Quad!!!

I haven't got a clue what a TCP Optimiser is - I am quite happy with my ISP (Pipex) but was intrigued by the advert in the newspaper yesterday and thought that people at PCR would know what was what!!

I am convinced and will be staying as I am!!!

It's been interesting though!!

Gabrielle x
 
Hmm... sounds like exactly like AOL, same idea with the whole compressed graphics. To be frank, i never noticed a diffrence when surfing normally.
 
Having still got a pipex 1.2 m bb connection I was very curious re ONSPEED, so today spent me £24.99 on charges and got connected . Do'nt know what to think, yes!!, evreything is faster but pictures are quality reduced, However you like to put it. But general surfing is very fast. I won't post my comp spec as we are talking software here and this is for mainly dial up, even though BB is mentioned in the adverts(of which I saw).

But I think you would be surprised if you had choice to use it, the trial i've seen is on front cover disk of internet advisor issue 70 1 month no charge.
 
Welcome to the site Christopher!

That is some interesting results you have seen, I'm glad someon has taken the plunge to find out :) Would you say it is worth the £25.99/year?
 
As I did not come up on the down train I made sure that if the ONSPEED set up did not make a significant difference I can get my £24.99 back,( in fourteen days in not satisfied) and that is so.

I have a PIPEX 1.2M BB connection (why would want ONSPEED THEN ?) I am nosey plain and simple.

The down stream ( a normal 875 on pipex quoted as 1.2 stat) is boosted to 910 with on speed, up stream it makes no diff at all.

I you play around with the acceleration/ clarity control a slider that you set to what ticckles your fancy Accleration or image quality, you can't have both. They say they are working on already compressed data MP3 and the such like (watch this space).

My next test will be to unplug my BB and go on to good old Dial up with and without onspeed, see what ya think then.

BYE
 
Hi Just wanted to let you know that there is another product like onspeed.. which claims look just as good as ONSPEED:

www.proxyconn.com and they too offer a 7 free trial period to test the software... proxyconn, unlike ONSPEED, do not claim loss of quality though.. I would have loved to have tried the software but live in Africa and the service is not supported yet in Africa..

Also, there is another software called SpeedOPtimizer, which is supported by the producers of Download Accelerator Plus (seems to be a successful software) which claims to also speed up internet use..

I have been looking for formal reviews of this type of software but have not come up with any on the net.

regards

Kiranx
 
Was googling around and seen this thread, and I've Ive just signed up with ONSPEED, I thought I'd give you ppl a dialup user's first impressions...

I have to say I'm really impressed with this software as an accelerator for web browsing, the difference is very noticeable (feels like 3-4 times faster, maybe not quite the five advertised). Yeah, the site images are compressed, but with pic compression set to the second-lowest level you get a very good tradeoff bewtween speed and quality. Most site images are fairly redundant anyway, and you won't notice much of a quality difference, and with any ones you'd rather have Hi-Q, a simple right-click and selecting "show original image" will load up the original uncompressed pic.

I tend to browse a lot of extremely image-intensive graphic art forums, and this is where the speed increase really shows. Same with online shopping sites that have large thumbnail galleries to browse through, the onspeed software changes things from a cringe-inducing crawl to a fast-loading, much more acceptable speed. It's not going to make a massive increase to file downloading (although they claim to be working on new algorithms especially for MPGs, exes and mp3s, which I'll believe when I see 'em), but as an aid to general web browsing and email downloading, I'd have to take a long, hard think before returning to just vanilla dialup again.

In short, if you can't afford broadband, or (more likely) simply can't get it in your area, this is a significant boost to regular dialup, and well worth the money.
 
Onspeed query.

Hi guys.

I cant get bb in my area and am fairly intrested in this. My main reason for getting bb however would be online gaming and using the video conversation on msnger (as this can be frequently unusable). Does anyone know if optimizer works for the above.

Cheers in advance for any help.

Paul
 
bagguley said:
Hi guys.

I cant get bb in my area and am fairly intrested in this. My main reason for getting bb however would be online gaming and using the video conversation on msnger (as this can be frequently unusable). Does anyone know if optimizer works for the above.

Cheers in advance for any help.

Paul
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Where do you live? Must be fairly remote. I hope that when ADSL2+ arrives the distance limits for ADSL will be relaxed once again.
 
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