Article written 24/Oct/07
Onspeed internet accelerator.

Onspeed are currently giving away a free six month trial of their software (as of 24/Oct/07).
Onspeed can accelerate your internet connection, by compressing images (png, jpg, gif), HTML and Flash. It works best with dialup, but you may notice a speed improvement if your broadband connection is very poor.

Onspeed works by sitting between your browser and the internet. When you request a web page, the Onspeed servers collect and compress it and then send it to you. The Onspeed software on your computer decompresses the page and sends it to your browser. So the amount of data being sent to your computer is reduced and your browsing speed increases.

The statistics window shows the savings achieved through compression. I do have some doubts about the accuracy of the figures, as they seem somewhat optimistic and my speed increase is nowhere near 5.22 times.

How much Onspeed can compress a page depends on the content.
Most webmasters don't compress the HTML code that produces the layout and text of the web page. HTML will actually compress very well, reducing file size by two thirds, or more.
Images can also be compressed, by lowering the image quality, which reduces the file size. This works best with jpg and bmp images, although png and gif images can also be reduced in size depending on whether the webmaster has optimised them, or not.
You can control the reduction in image quality and the "very good" setting seems to be an acceptable compromise between speed and quality.

This is the original picture and the same picture with the quality set to "very good" and then below left "good"


As the compression is increased the picture quality drops, the bottom right picture is maximum acceleration and about 30% of the file size of the original, but picture quality is very poor.

I have noticed, that when using Onspeed there seems to be a slightly longer delay, when making the intial connection to some web pages, but this could just be a unlucky coincidence, as the speed of the internet does vary considerably in normal use.

The downloading and installation of Onspeed is straightforward, you have to provide a valid email address and your name, address etc. You are then sent a user name and password and you are ready to go.
When you connect to the internet, the Onspeed software will connect a few seconds later and then you can use your browser as normal.

Initially I had a slight problem getting Opera to work with Onspeed, because I had messed around with the browser proxy settings to use the Proxomitron, but a quick adjustment soon had it running.

How much of a speed increase you will notice when using Onspeed, depends on several things, how low you are prepared to set the image quality, how slow your original connection was and how well designed the web page you are visiting is.
My web pages don't compress very much, because I already use a HTML compressor (albeit not a drastic one) and most of my images are color reduced gifs.
But some sites compress very well, particularly those with lots of jpg images and messy HTML.
Although the Onspeed statistics often say I am getting a three, to five times faster connection, in reality it seems perhaps fifty percent quicker some of the time. However, I usually use the Proxomitron, which blocks adverts very effectively and I lose this benefit when using Onspeed, which reduces any improvement that I might see.

Whether you will like Onspeed, or not, depends on whether the compressed images annoy you. If you can ignore them, or they don't bother you, you will see a useful speed boost.
If you are using broadband, I doubt that Onspeed will speed your already quick connection by a noticable amount, as the amount of compression that is significant on a 56K connection, is irrelevant on a 1MB+ connection.
No help file comes with Onspeed, but I advise reading the comprehensive help file on the web site, to fully understand the features of Onspeed.

I'm not sure if I will continue with Onspeed, in some ways the Proxomitron is better, there is no page look up delay, images are full quality and adverts are ruthlessly blocked. But I shall persevere for the moment.

Note: The Google search engine doesn't seem to like Onspeed very much (It didn't last time I tried Onspeed!) and you may need to turn Onspeed off while Googling.

Free 6 month trial, normal price £24.99 for a 12 month subscription.
Download size 5.93MB -- Win 98, NT, ME, 2000, XP, Vista

http://www.onspeed.com/freetrial

Rob Goldfish Web Site

Copyright 2007 Rob Goldfish.