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Wednesday January 21, 10:46 AM ET

From the looks of television ads and media hype, you could be forgiven for believing that every Internet user surfs the Web via high-speed, costly, broadband connections, such as DSL or cable lines. But 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. This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I tested a few of these products to see if they really worked.

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, nonaccelerated service.

Read complete article at: AzCentral.com 

Source: Walter S. Mossberg, Wall Street Journal and
reporting by Katherine Boehret, AzCentral.com

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