Proxyconn "modem accelerator" considered worthless
Garry W
The "Proxyconn" internet service purports to speed up your internet
connection. It claims to do this by:
1) Rerouting network requests through their server. Their Server
then provides improved caching and compression.
2) Removing popups, banner ads, etc
3) Allowing images to be degraded (blurred) to make them smaller
I'm desperate for more speed - I'm on a 28.8 dialup, with no possibility of
broadband in the area. At least one well-known magazine reported than
Proxyconn worked great, so I decided to try it.
I just waited an hour and a half on this worthless product. Want to save
other people the trouble.
Methodology: run internet explorer 6.0, completely purge the IE cache, time
the downloads of 20 miscellaneous web pages, then time them all again with a
cache purge, then reboot, install proxyconn (with the popup-avoidance
diabled), and repeat the entire process.
Results: Proxyconn is either worthless or worse than worthless. Less than
worthless in that downloaded images frequently jammed and timed out waiting
for Proxyconn's apparently-overloaded servers to respond. Worthless in that,
even after image re-compression was disabled, a few pages were slightly
faster in Proxyconn, but other pages were slightly slower in Proxyconn. In
other words, there was no detectable net benefit to using Proxyconn. No
speeds remotely resembling the company's claimed speeds occurred under any
circumstances.
Conclusion: AVOID this product. It's worthless, or worse than worthless.
Caveat: at least they made it simple and straightforward to unsubscribe from
the service.
Hope this helps someone someday.
Garry
PS - Apparently-similar products include Speedband, Propel, etc
°Mike°
On Wed, 17 Mar 2004 15:15:00 -0800, in
<13mh50td6hj8dfu28...@4ax.com>
Garry W scrawled:
<snip>
>It's worthless, or worse than worthless.
<snip>
--
Basic computer maintenance
http://uk.geocities.com/personel44/maintenance.html
JWooden271
broadband is a view to the southern sky.
More info:
http://direcway.com/default.asp
http://www.starband.com/
Garry W
>Have you tried looking at broadband over satellite? All you need for
>broadband is a view to the southern sky.
>
>More info:
>http://direcway.com/default.asp
>http://www.starband.com/
Cool... but... I remember when the satellite options first came out... I
heard some complaints that both the TCP turnaround times and the overall
speed were not as good as people hoped... but that was a long time ago. Do
the services actually work well now? I.e., as fast as DSL or cable?
Appreciate the thought. Thanks.
Garry
Dan Shea
Download speed is not quite in the same league as cable/DSL, but is
not bad. Basic satellite starts at around 250 kbps; high-end packages
max out at around 500-600 kbps. Also, upload speeds are drastically
limited -- usually 128 or 256 kbps bursts, which practically operate
at around 60 kbps.
Ping times (probably what you refer to as TCP turnaround times) suck.
It's not uncommon to get ping times of > 1000 ms. If you're playing
online games over satellite, you'll get murdered.
Cheers,
dan
Garry W
>Ping times (probably what you refer to as TCP turnaround times) suck.
>It's not uncommon to get ping times of > 1000 ms. If you're playing
>online games over satellite, you'll get murdered.
I just searched on "Starband" and "ping"...
And: Yipes!
Theoretical minimum (limited by the speed of light) is around 500ms. People
are reporting actual of 900ms to 2000ms. *That'll* start slowing down your
email download!!
Looking at "Direcway" and "ping"...
Direcway lets you use a phone line for the uplink ("dial return").
Theoretical minimum should be around 250ms; people are actually getting
600ms. Not great, but not quite as bad.
Anyhow. For my next step I may try ganging together several dialup lines
(multilink PPP), if my ISP will allow that...
thanks for the thinkin'
Garry