This article will explain how it works and will hopefully allow the reader to make a better decision.
First of all, when your computer tells the modem to call your Internet Service Provider (ISP), you may hear some screeching noises. This is called a “handshake”. In a handshake, there are two sections, a hardware handshake and a software handshake. The first one is your modem talking to your ISP’s modem and configuring each other to pass information. The second handshake is your machine telling the ISP that you have an account and you are eligible to connect.
A high-speed ISP generally has shortened the software handshake, allowing you to log in and start transferring data faster. The new way for the software handshake is still as secure as the old way though.
The next set of techniques used are where users normally notice an increased speed. Most high-speed ISPs use an “Acceleration Server”. When you are using a regular ISP, any time you go to a website, your computer must send data through many machines to reach the site. These are called “hops”. On my machine right now I can see that it takes me 16 hops to reach google.com. If I were using an Acceleration server, the Acceleration server would be doing the majority of those hops using broadband rather than dialup. It may still take 16 hops to get the website, but instead of each hop averaging greater than 1 second, they tend to be far under 1 second. For instance, my machine is on broadband DSL and I average around 30 milliseconds. Another thing that Acceleration servers can do is “cache” the website data in memory so that it doesn’t have to hop to the site each time someone wants to view it.
The biggest difference maker is compression. A high-speed ISP uses file compression to convert an image that may have 16 million colors into the same image with 65 thousand colors. You may notice some degradation in the image, but generally the speed increase is worth it because a 65 thousand color image can be half the size, thereby taking half the time to download. At this time there are still some types of files that can not be easily compressed such as streaming media, secure web pages, music, pictures sent via email, and downloads such as Windows Updates. File compression is getting better all the time, so we may see some of these file types being compressed in the future.
The last thing that I will talk about is filtering. Many websites have advertisements now. Some even have pop-ups or pop-under ads that can fill your entire screen. Each time these ads are sent, your computer must use time to download them. To combat this slowdown, high-speed ISPs have included software that filters out certain types of advertisements. This also has the added benefit of allowing you to ignore the ads that it filters out because they never get to your machine.
With all of this information about high-speed ISPs floating through our heads, you may be wondering if it actually works as advertised. Well, Netzero did the work for us and compared speeds to many popular sites. Each time is listed as the amount of time it takes to fully load the first page.
- www.amazon.com – 4.3 seconds with high-speed, 17.6 seconds without
- www.microsoft.com – 4.5 seconds with high-speed, 21.7 seconds without
- www.paypal.com – 3.5 seconds with high-speed, 12.4 seconds without
- www.target.com – 4.1 seconds with high-speed, 25.1 seconds without
- www.ebay.com – 3.0 seconds with high-speed, 15.1 seconds without
- www.msn.com – 2.7 seconds with high-speed, 11.1 seconds without
In conclusion, we can see that high-speed dialup works pretty well to make dialup faster for those that would like more speed but don’t need broadband.