About Onspeed

Internet connection accelerator Onspeed claims to increase dial-up speeds by a factor of five, and even broadband by a factor of three, all for less than 50p per week. Not surprisingly then, we were deeply cynical that the cost-to-benefit ratio could be anywhere near as impressive as it appears.

About Onspeed
Internet connection accelerator Onspeed claims to increase dial-up speeds by a factor of five, and even broadband by a factor of three, all for less than 50p per week. Not surprisingly then, we were deeply cynical that the cost-to-benefit ratio could be anywhere near as impressive as it appears. That's further fuelled by advertising claims that dial-up performance with Onspeed 'rivals that of broadband'.

Let's state the obvious to start with: Onspeed doesn't increase your bandwidth - a 1Mb/sec connection remains exactly that. Rather, it compresses the data you receive, and the smaller the amount of data being delivered to your web browser or email client the faster it will arrive. It's a small but important distinction.

This compression is achieved using no less than nine patented compression methodologies wrapped up in what ZGroup, developers of Onspeed, call Content Sensitive Compression. Originally developed at considerable cost by the US military, this simply recognises different data types using an array of algorithms, breaking each down into its component parts. More maths is applied to compress each data type using a best match basis. When you browse to a website, the page request is routed via the Onspeed servers where the text, graphics, Flash and other components are compressed on-the-fly before being passed to your browser. The small amount of proxy delay is supposedly more than offset by the increased speed of delivery.

Or at least that's the theory: in reality, it depends on the page being downloaded. Text compresses very well, be it on the web page or in email, but anything already using a lossy system such as JPEG images compresses rather badly. To reduce image size, you have to lose quality, and Onspeed provides a better quality/faster delivery configuration slider for this very purpose.

In practice, our results were mixed. Of 38MB of data transferred, 29MB was compressed, giving an overall speed increase of 1.3x. This broke down as text with a 6.31x increase, graphics 2.88x, upstream data 1.68x and 'other' at 1.09x. That's some way behind the claimed 3x speed increase for broadband connections, and even further behind if we were to tweak the image-quality setting up from the default. This is certainly something you'd want to do with any surfing that contained important images, as we found the definition a little too soft and fuzzy on a 1,600 x 1,200 resolution screen. The 'Advanced Imaging' function, which loads images concurrently and progressively for the illusion of speed, doesn't help much either.

In its favour, Firefox support is now provided by way of an automatic configuration utility, but the fact that Onspeed won't work for HTTPS browsing, over a VPN or for file downloads and uploads (including MP3 and streaming content) only serves to further limit its real-world usefulness.

If you're stuck on dial-up, Onspeed does deliver on its promises of making the online experience that little bit speedier, but it's clearly not anywhere near broadband quality. If you use a capped broadband service, you'll get more for your money because less data is being downloaded. If you've got an uncapped broadband connection, though, the nominal increase in downloading times doesn't offset the loss of image quality nor the outlay of 50p per week.

System Specifications
Requirements Windows 98 onwards.
Verdict
Despite some questionable advertising claims, those on dial-up or tightly capped broadband Internet connections may benefit from more efficient surfing
Author: Davey Winder
PC Pro Online



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