Step on the Gas

'Accelerator' Services Can Make Dial-Up Connections Ride Like Broadband

By Walter S. Mossberg
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

From the looks of television ads and media hype, you might assume that every Internet user surfs the Web via high-speed, costly, broadband connections, such as DSL or cable lines. In fact, most U.S. Internet users still rely on slow, but cheaper, dial-up services.

Dial-up services are advertised as being capable of speeds as high as 56 kilobits a second-just a tenth the speed of even a middling broadband link. But the truth is much worse. Most dial-up modems in most places on most services achieve speeds of between 30 and 45 kilobits most of the time. And many Web sites now cater to broadband users with flashy features the dial-up gear can't handle.

But there's hope for dial-up users who don't want to lay out the big bucks for broadband. Some big Internet service providers and software companies are offering special "accelerator" technology to speed up the dial-up online experience. Not only is this concept confusing, but it sounds like an exaggerated marketing gimmick. Recently, my assistant Katie Boehret and I tested a few of these products to see if they really worked.

Compressed Data

With the accelerated services, the dial-up modem isn't sending or retrieving data any faster than normal, but smart technology that compresses and "caches" data is designed to make it seem that way. The compression works by squeezing down the size of the files that produce graphics and photos on Web pages. This makes them load faster over a dial-up line, but it also makes them grainier and fuzzier.

Caching, or retrieving and retaining data from Web pages in the computer's memory, also plays a big role in the acceleration of dial-up accounts. With caching, your PC stores some of the basic Web-site elements the first time you visit a site, and reuses them to speed up load time on each subsequent visit. Browsers do some caching, but accelerator technology does more.

Katie and I tested three of these products: EarthLink Accelerator, NetZero HiSpeed and Propel Accelerator. The first two are dial-up services with accelerator technology built in. Propel is a stand-alone accelerator service that you can add, for an extra monthly fee, to any basic dial-up service. For comparison, we also tested NetZero's plain, unaccelerated service.

The basic, slow NetZero account we tested costs $9.95 a month. NetZero HiSpeed was $14.95 a month. EarthLink Accelerator costs $21.95 a month. And Propel costs $7.95 a month, or $59.95 a year-but that's an additional fee on top of whatever you pay for your basic dial-up service. All are cheaper than true high-speed service, which typically costs around $40 to $50 per month.

With each setup, we visited a variety of Web pages to see how fast they loaded, and we also measured the speed of each by running a performance test from a Web site called Toast.net, which times how long it takes to load graphics and text.

We focused on repeatedly visiting two Web sites in particular, CNN.com and ESPN.com, which both have plenty of text, photographs and moving advertisements. In between each visit to these Web sites, and before switching to a new service, we cleared the browser's cache. NetZero HiSpeed loaded CNN with ease, while EarthLink and the Propel-enhanced basic NetZero were considerably more sluggish. Each of the three services had trouble loading ESPN's site quickly. The graphics on each page were noticeably grainier than usual. But each accelerated service gives you the option of reloading the graphics at their original quality, if you need to see them that way and are willing to wait.

Katie and I performed the Toast performance test with each option, clearing the Web browser's cache each time to ensure fresh results. The test consists of downloading a very long text document and a very large graphic. Plain NetZero was very slow, at 32 kbps, and took over three minutes to download the text and picture. NetZero HiSpeed was consistently blazing, clocking in at over 350 kilobits per second, and downloading the text and picture in just 17 seconds.

EarthLink Accelerator (which uses Propel technology) and Propel turned in wildly varying results on the Toast test. In one test run, they each took about 2.5 minutes to do the download and appeared like regular slow dial-up connections. In another, each performed like a broadband connection, outpacing NetZero HiSpeed.

NetZero Has the Edge

On balance, considering both the Toast test and our general surfing experience, we believe NetZero HiSpeed offers the most consistent acceleration, and comes close to the feeling you get with a midrange broadband system.

With NetZero HiSpeed, a tiny toolbar is displayed at the lower right-hand corner of the screen. This toolbar includes a speedometer that supposedly measures how much faster your page is loading than a normal dial-up service would load the page. There's also a slider that sets HiSpeed to load pages faster or slower, according to the image quality that you prefer viewing on each Web page.

Not only did repeatedly visited Web pages load much faster, but Web pages that we visited for the first time also loaded in no time.

We found the Propel Accelerator to be noticeably better than dial-up, but not as dramatically fast as NetZero HiSpeed. It seemed most effective on previously visited pages, whereas NetZero was just faster from the start.

EarthLink's Accelerator comes built into the latest EarthLink software, TotalAccess 2004. It wasn't as reliably fast as NetZero HiSpeed, but it was faster than the regular dial-up, and it, too, gradually improved with more and more repeated Web-site visits.

If your family isn't ready to pay for broadband, these accelerated dial-up services are a good alternative. We suggest NetZero HiSpeed, but after repeatedly using Propel or EarthLink, you'd still notice an improvement.

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