With both Sky and TalkTalk offering free high speed Broadband to their customers, there has been an upsurge in people switching over to a Broadband cable or ADSL internet connection.  You therefore have to wonder what place remains for an internet accelerator. 

However, many people are still unable to access the promised 8MB (and above) Broadband speeds.  Although cable customers will generally receive the speed of service which they sign up to (due to something known as a 1:1 contention ratio), the picture is very different for people who have to utilise an ADSL connection over a standard telephone line.  That is because an ADSL connection has a 1:50 contention ration, which means that up to 50 people may be utilising the same connection at the local exchange thus limiting speed.  Distance from the exchange itself is also a limiting factor, as is the lack of appropriate equipment in all of the telephone exchanges.

Another reason why you may need to optimise your connection, might be that you use a mobile phone to connect to the internet (through GPRS) or that you have several computers and games machines in the household sharing the one connection, either through a wired network or a wireless connection.  You might also simply be one of the people who are still unable to receive any type of broadband service, or who do not want to be tied into a 12 month contract for some reason.  Finally, you might need to work out on site or abroad some of the time, in which case you need to connect to the internet using a dialup connection (as your broadband service is linked to your own telephone line, not to your computer).

In all of these instances it can be useful to optimise your connection speed through the use of an internet accelerator.

ONSPEED offer an internet accelerator which operates in a very similar method to the Propel internet accelerator.  Internet Accelerators are designed to provide a massive improvement in dial-up internet connection based internet browsing.  A secondary advantage of using an internet accelerator such as OnSpeed is that if you wish to connect to the internet from a PC using a GPRS connection on your mobile phone, the data compression techniques used mean that much less data is sent over the GPRS connection, thus reducing the cost of using this method of connection, as well as improving the speed. 

OnSpeed is a commercial product which does not involve any monitoring of your internet activity, but merely installs onto your PC and uses specialised compression techniques to improve the speed of transfers to and from the internet.  Unlike many of the other programs which promise to optimise your internet connection (or modem), or which offer a "free" internet accelerator (such as Marketscore), OnSpeed and Propel do both offer noticeable improvements in speed - on average around 5x normal dial-up speeds.

The cost of OnSpeed is excellent value for money, at only £24.99pa ( $39.99 / 34.99€ ) and due to having servers based in the UK, we have found that OnSpeed offers probably a much higher level of acceleration than any other similar products..  The latest version of OnSpeed (v5) also offers an array of features very similar to Propel, although it does not perform any type of local caching of content.  The latest improvement has been with images - traditionally the speed increase is traded against the quality of pictures on a site.  However, in order to ensure that the text on a site loads as quickly as possible, Onspeed loads the images with initially a low level quality and then slowly downloads additional information for the pictures, until they are shown on screen with high quality.  This is known as progressive image loading and ensures that your internet connection is accelerated with exceptional quality.

The latest version of OnSpeed now supports MAC computers (OS v10.2 and later, using Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Netscape Safari 1.0 and above), which is a welcome addition to the service.  PC users also benefit from acceleration within all of the following browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer v5.0+, Netscape Navigator v6.0, Phaseout v5.1, Opera v7, Avant v9.02, Firefox v0.8, Mozilla v1.6 and MYIE2 v0.9 (or later versions). 

The program is now a lot quicker to download (equal to Propel and Marketscore), as it has been reduced to around 1 Mb in size, and sets up on the system without any apparent difficulty, even where there are several Windows accounts present and more than one browser in use at the time.  It also allows you to easily disable the internet acceleration in case you come across any problems or want to test the difference it is making to your system - simply click on the icon and select "Disable ONSPEED".  

OnSpeed promises to speed-up your internet connection and your emails (to or from POP3 and SMTP servers only), by using their specialised compression techniques.  However, the greatest restriction on this at the moment is that the program needs to be able to access ports 110 (POP3) and 25 (SMTP) and cannot increase the speed of sending or receiving emails,  if other programs are monitoring those ports. All standard email programs are now supported, although we have found that OnSpeed was initially  unable to speed up the sending of email, due to a conflict with the IIS Server which we also run our PC.  Following a warning by OnSpeed that another program was monitoring port 25, we simply had to alter the configuration of the IIS Server so that it did not look at port 25 for SMTP email and this has now rectified this problem.

Although AOL is not supported, AOL v9 includes its own internet accelerator (AOL TopSpeed) which is for use exclusively inside the AOL browser - as such, ONSPEED therefore complements this.  The only problem that we have encountered with the way that AOL interacts with the OnSpeed internet accelerator, is that for some reason, OnSpeed does not appear to be able to accelerate the connection used by Microsoft's Internet Explorer when AOL is used (mainly because AOL's internet connection no longer appears in the list of Internet Connections - at least on our system).  However, every other browser which we have tried does not suffer from this problem and we understand that it is peculiar to the current version of AOL and Internet Explorer. We would therefore recommend that you use a different browser with AOL, such as Opera or Firefox.

Further, although OnSpeed is stated to be compatible with the MAC OS (v10.2 and later), Pocket PCs, Windows 98/ME/2000 and XP, it will also work with Windows 95 (they have however stopped supporting this operating system).  They also claim to be working on versions of the software for the ever popular Linux operating system.

How does OnSpeed Improve Internet Speed?

The OnSpeed software works by compressing text and graphics contained on any webpage (or within emails).  Each internet access is routed through their UK based servers, which then compress the data before transmitting them to your computer.

At the moment ONSPEED have dedicated algorithms for compressing the following web page elements (all protected by 9 pending patents):

• Photo-realistic images (e.g., JPEG, PNG, GIF, and BMP)
• Line Art and Drawings (e.g., GIF, BMP)
• Animated objects (GIF)
• HTML objects
• Text, etc
• Office Documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
• PDF Documents
• Macromedia Flash

Any elements that do not have a dedicated algorithm, get compressed using a generic compression algorithm. This is intended to ensure that you still see a  20-30% speed increase on these elements.  If you want to display a picture without any loss of quality, you can either alter the settings of OnSpeed to provide original image quality, or right click on an image from within Internet Explorer and choose to either "Show All Original Images" or "Show Original Image".

OnSpeed are also reportedly working on new algorithms for the transmission of MP3 files and Mpeg4 for video, achieving a 300% - 500% speed increase..

How does OnSpeed Perform?

In tests, OnSpeed appeared to deliver very similar results to the Propel internet accelerator, increasing narrowband timings by a factor of around 7 and even speeding up broadband connections by a factor of around 5.  If you connect your PC to the internet via a GPRS connection (such as when working on site), you will be pleased to know that OnSpeed averages a speed up of around 10 times - this also has the added benefit of reducing the amount of data sent over GPRS and therefore reducing the cost of this form of internet connection (as you are charged on the amount of data transferred).  As with Propel, you are able to adjust the amount of compression used within graphics on web-pages and emails, so that you can trade the speed of downloads against the quality of graphics that you can see.  However, we have noticed a substantial difference between the two programs (in OnSpeed's favour), although this is mainly due to the fact that we are based in the UK, as is OnSpeed, whereas Propel do not currently have any UK proxy servers (resulting in a slight delay is everything is routed via their American server).

We have tested the latest v5 of OnSpeed over a week, using a wireless receiver to a 1Mb Cable Broadband connection and have found an average of 1.9 speed up, even whilst the connection was shared with another computer.  This means that OnSpeed would even prove of benefit for people with permanent wireless connections, as well as direct connections to the internet.