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There are a lot of dial up internet service providers out there today advertising “high speed dial up” as an alternative to standard dial up services. While many DSL and Cable users respond to this with a yawn for the almost 50% of Americans who have no reasonably priced broadband options the promise of more speed across a dial up modem sounds like a great idea. The question is does it work? The simple and short answer is yes, it works very well for many users when it comes to browsing the Internet and visiting their favorite web sites. In particular it works for much of rural America who are the primary consumers with no access to broadband. Companies like Sage Telecom and others offer high-speed dial up Internet bundled with low cost local telephone service to rural residents of many areas ignored by broadband providers. While high-speed dial up will provide you with a better Internet experience, what it won’t do is speed up transactions on secure servers, speed up direct file downloading or downloading of large email attachments. This leave some asking, “exactly what does it speed up” and the answer the three most common uses of the Internet by light users, browsing, normal email and searching. Recently “How Stuff Works”, ran a test using a high speed dial up connection vs. a standard dial up line and the following results were noted after visiting some popular websites. Amazon.com Load time with standard service – 49 seconds Load time with repeated visits on high-speed dial up – 14 seconds Improvement 3.5 times faster CNN.com Load time with standard service – 72 seconds Load time with repeated visits on high-speed dial up – 9 seconds Improvement 8 times faster Yahoo.com Load time with standard service – 26 seconds Load time with repeated visits on high-speed dial up – 7 seconds Improvement 3.7 times faster As you can see there is a substantial gain in performance. This occurs for a lot of technical reasons but the two main methods are caching (basically storing a copy of files) and compressing (reducing the size of a file). Cashing happens in two places… One on the ISPs Servers, this is the process of saving a daily copy of popular web sites so the can be directly downloaded from you ISP vs. across multiple connections. In this way your PC is given faster access to files and can download them quicker. This is done on what is called an “acceleration server” and is shown in the image below.

The second way files are cached is on your hard drive. ISP software provided by high speed dial up providers that you install also maximizes your own PC’s ability to cache files on your hard drive in this way if you visit a common group of sites the elements of that site that never change such as the navigation bar, logo or stock graphics are stored on your machine and your internet connection only has to download the content that changes. The second method used to speed up downloading is called compression (making a large file smaller by removing unnecessary parts of it) This is one of the key reasons high speed dial up won’t let you down load an MP3 any faster. When you download an image with this type of service the image is compressed and some of the data is lost when it is reassembled on your monitor the quality is slightly lower but to the average person the reduction is not noticed. Likewise the code of most web pages is also compressed during downloading by the acceleration server and reassembled on your PC. This process speeds up browsing time a great deal. So what’s that got to do with MP3’s? MP3 files for instance are already hugely compressed and are about 10 times smaller then a CD audio track of the same song hence there is just no room left to compress them any further. Other things that can’t be sped up with compression would be any encrypted files. When encrypted data is transmitted, the code looks like a bunch of gibberish so that no one can read it. When this gibberish reaches the acceleration server, it can't compress the code: If the compression software were to change even one character in the encrypted transmission that would render the data unusable. So the basics of what High Speed Dial up Does and Does Not Speed Up. Accelerated Files Include:

• HTML and Java Web Pages
• Regular Email
• Text
• Graphics

Files Not Accelerated Include:

• Streaming Media
• Secure Web Pages
• Music and Photos Sent as Email
• Direct File Downloads

So is high-speed dial up right for you? If you can’t get Broadband it is about as good as it gets and with Great Providers like Sage Telecom offering high speed internet for only $9.95 a month it really doesn’t make a lot of sense for anyone to use a standard un-accelerated dial up connection.

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