We know that many of you still use a dial-up modem to access the internet, so you may be pleased to hear that OnSpeed is a new (and greatly hyped) service that accelerates web browsing and email on dial-up internet connections.
The basic principle behind OnSpeed is that if you can't increase the amount of data going through a modem, why not reduce the amount you have to transfer? To this end, the text, animations and images found on websites are sent to OnSpeed's computers, which compress the information before sending it on to you.
The most important setting to worry about is the level of image compression that should be applied. The compression effect is much like that used for the JPEG images. As the level of compression increases some of the definition in the picture is lost, so you have to find an acceptable balance between image quality and how quickly you want to browse websites. Having said that, we set the compression level quite high and found little change in image quality.



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