Any REAL difference in dialup speed between providers?

[FlashHarry]

I keep seeing ads for companies such as NetZero and EarthLink that claim that their dialup is X-times faster than the competition. Now, I always thought that you were only as fast as your modem, 56k, in this case. My mom uses a dialup (mFire), but it would be great to get her a little more speed. (Thank god I have cable.)

I guess my question is, are the speed claims of all these dialup companies nothing more than smoke and mirrors?

[Don_G]

1. Yes There Is

I've used about 4 dial-ups so far and there is a difference in speed and being knocked off line. MSN was pretty good, AOL and another was pretty bad about both and I havent had a problem with Earthlink so far.

[BlueJazz]

2. Probably a lot more depends on how....

....far you are from the exchange.
I had a friend that was across the street from one (exchange) and his speeds
were the fastest I've evet seen.

There's also programs on the web that will "tweek" your system a lot
more than changing providers.

[rabid_nerd]

3. It is smoke and mirrors

(ON EDIT, I'm TALKING ABOUT THINGS LIKE "NETZERO HISPEED" AND OTHER ADDITIVE-DIALUPS)

But what looks real is real, right?

I know that doesn't make sense, but basically, as long as the person is just a browser and not an internet hobbyist/blogger/has own website/etc. They should do OK.

It does NOT speed up the lines, but rather selectively pre-loads some data, compresses it before sending, and caches it so more things load from your hard drive instead of off the net if it hasn't changed, and the "throughput speed" of some downloads would be increased.

Basically it will NOT help with:

- Downloading files
- Can interfere with technical tasks, specifically web development

It does help with:

- Browsing the web as a surfer

[Paragon]

4. Nope.

They're referring to programs written into their software which "speed up" (read: compress) things like downloads, etc.

The only way to really go faster on a phone line is to use DSL. Having used DSL myself, skip it and go for cable access. Bigger pipes and similar price. The internet really opens up for you when you're going tens or hundreds times faster.

[FlashHarry]

6. Yeah. I had DSL and it was a nightmare.

It was always out for some reason or another. I spent literally hours on hold at a time, waiting to talk to the kind folks at Qwest. Now I have a cable connection. It's waay faster (not many people on my node) and my downtime has been virtually nil.

[xJlM]

5. No, some of them really suck

And some are little better. The best way to find out is with a good modem that you know is capable of moving 53333bps, which is as fast as you can get over a phone line anyway. But the only real way to know is to try it. A good guide can be found at http://www.testspeed.com/ . You'll get an upstream and downstream measurement there, but like I said the only way to know is to try.

[BigMcLargehuge]

7. the earlier post about use of precache is correct

a 56 K modem is exactly that for a physical reason, and even a 56k is theoretical.

(Puts on Telecom Instructional Designer Hat)

Analog phones connect to digital switches. Digital switches convert the human voice to digital signals. The analog wave representing a human voice is sampled at 4kHz, or 4000 times a second. Any signal amplitude above 4kHz is sheared off.

The reason a modem works is that is converts digital signals into analog signals for transmission over the access line between your residence and the digital switch. To fit into that narrow transmission band the signals can only approximate the sounds that a human voice would make, that is, sounds in the 4kHz band.

The true speed of a 56k modem is closer to 43K because signal overhead eats into some of the bandwidth as does the resistant nature of copper.

Being closer to the central office is irrelevant, for the most part, with 56 K, it does however severly limit DSL throughput (as the signals travel outside the voiceband). Because equipment to limit attenuation is already installed between the customer and the Central Office. Since analog data for a modem travels in the 4kHz band it benefits from loop extenders and other amplification equipment.

What Netzero and the other "fast download" dialup places do is preload non-multimedia stuff from a web page, which actually decreases your overall throughput, but you don't really notice, so for example, you google "cats" rather than simply download the index page Google creates, Netzero also pulls down the text content of the index pages of the first ten entries and stores them in your HD. Assuming you click the first link for "cats" then the text of that page is already loaded. This is called a precache algorithm. To facilitate this the netzero software actually uses part of your download for non-user-specific data, which, while seeming very slow at first, appears faster as more and more ancillary information caches up on the HD.

AOL and MSN dedicate a portion of dialup bandwidth to shoving ads and popup at you all the time, so even with a 56K line, you are only getting about 33K download speeds as some of the bandwidth is used to non-user specific data downstream.

Now, assuming you are still awake, that's why.

[Eat_The_Rich]

8. The speed...

is usually dictated by the physical phone lines. Even if you have a 56k modem, I have rarely seen speeds in excess of 44k.