Dial-up users, check it out...

[Budfred]

Article in PCWorld about speeding up connection without Broadband:

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/...101002a,00.asp

Budfred

[sleddog]

The bottom line is you can't "speed up" a connection (dial-up or whatever). These accelerator products & services employ caching and content blocking to reduce the amount of new content fetched from the Internet. Yes, a completed webpage may appear faster, but the connection isn't any "faster".

Most effective is using local caching and content filtering proxies. A Web page appears really fast when 75% of the content is delivered across the LAN or from the hard drive

[kayofcircles]

Sounds intriguing, though. As a coward, however, I was wondering if some braver soul with dial up will give it a try? And, as a paranoid coward, I wonder about spyware. How will this work with "controlling" ISPs, like AOL?

[steveo]

when I was on dial-up I used just about every means available to speed up the connection, including dressing up in ostrich feathers and dancing under a full moon. I have to agree with sleddog on this one. You can check your speed at many places, I use this one here

[Paul Komski]

Incidentally, with Opera you can see the speed as each page downloads.

IMHO, the best way to check your download (and upload if using an FTP program) speeds is to know the size of the file and then literally time it; but just have it as the only internet operation running at the time.

The problem is that you are also dependent on the server and connection at the other end - so straightforward ping times to your own DNS seem as reliable as anything else.