Re: Does accelerated dial up web surfing really wo
Let's do point by point;
> Earthlink has been pretty reliable but aren't most dial up ISP's these days?
It varies greatly by area. Some areas have good local support to maintain recently updated equipment, some don't. Netzero is cutting cost somehere, we just don't know where. If they have no headaches with earthlink, the $7 per month is not worth saving.
> Does this really work?
Yeah, a little. It assumes that you always go to the same web sites and that those web sites are slow. The frequently accessed pages or images are stored closer to you for fater retreval.
If you go to a site with dynamic HTML, or a lot of server side scripts or dynamically generated links (QVC, GOOGLE, ETC) it does not help a lot. It does not help much if the sites you visit are uniformly fast and not overloaded.
> What is the technology behind it?
I'm not sure which way netzero does it, though I think they use a proxy.
PROXY:
Some ISPs use dedicated caching proxy servers so that every web page you hit is stored on their server. You configure (or they do) your web browser to use their proxy server. Juno's provided my brother a different dial-up number.
The down side is that your private data and web surfing is stored on their server, and at times people end up seeing pages other's have accessed.
Some banks and other services have problems with proxies.
Daniel