Dial-up accelerator/good,bad, or ugly?

[flanzig1]

I just got an offer from my ISP to upgrade to their dial-up accelerator for an extra $2 a month. Do these things actually work or are they so limited that it's worthless?

[morriswindgate]

A phone line is a phone line and nothing can speed it up from what you are already getting. The so called fast phone line services do nothing more than use a bag of tricks that have been around for a longtime, such as changing the settings on your computer, using proxies, saving the temporary internet pages, stopping pop-ups, and a few other software based tricks. Most of these you can actually find with a google search and do yourself.
The only way you are going to get more speed out of you phone line is to switch to DSL.
In a nutshell>Not worth it.

[flanzig1]

Thanks, Morris. I guess I'll have to wait til spring for the ground to thaw to have cable trenched in.

[SonicVanguard]

They do help general browsing. My mother and father have it and it's great for their needs. For downloading files, forget it. It doesn't increase actual download speeds - as Morris said, it uses a combination of settinps on your computer, cached web pages and lower-resolution graphics (which is controlable - you can still read text within graphics yet notice the lower resolution) to increase the speed at which a page loads.

As I said, for my parents it's worth it. But then again, they don't do a lot of downloading.

Dave.

[RayH]

I pay $3 for such service. It does speed things up a bit for text surfers by compressing data. $3 is not the end of the world. Total, I'm pay $10 for dialup and acceleration. So what the hey?