Net Zero

What's your guys take on Net Zero. It seems like they feed customers bull to me as I can't imagine how 56k can feel like broadband. Has anyone tired this or know anything about it? I doubt I could get it in my area anyway but I'd be curious to see if it's any good. My guess is it's along the same lines as AOL's surf 5x faster garbage. And I imagine even if the surfing was faster the downloads would remain horrid as you simply can't breach the 56k theoretical limet right? Thanks for the feedback.

I think it uses a proxy cache, like Squid. It won't be faster until you have browsed a bunch of sites you visit, and for a site you have never visited, it would load at your connected speed.

Oh the whole cache deal. Thanks man. Well that pretty much dulls the whole appeal as FF is supposed to have superior cache technology and I don't really see any of my pages shooting right up.

I don't buy their whole broadband thing. Maybe in some areas they actually proved that it's faster then AOL by 5x or whatnot. But if your actually tight on money, then I guess their $10 a month deal is pretty nice. I rather use SBC DSL for $20 a month or so, runs much fastre then 56k.

ALL the so-called 5X faster dial-up is just software cache(ed) . No new technology is invoved what so ever ,

Caching only speeds up the response time, the actual amount of data to transfer stays the same.

Most systems that say they can accelerate 56k do one or several of these:
* They use the cache to highly compress the content, and an application on your computer to decompress it. Web sites are mainly text, so they compress quite nicely.
* They have a small cache on your computer to reduce the need for downloading repeated content.
* Some will even take the images, reduce the quality, then compress them and send them.. you can tell these because you end up with blurry images on webpages.

For downloads, this probably won't help much... if ti's already a highly compressed file, then recompressing it will only cause it to become larger..

Thanks guys. It's a clever ploy but there's no point of 'upgrading' too dial up even if it is that cheap. I'll get DSL eventually or when I go to college I definatly won't have to worry about that.