Broadband may be closer at hand than you think. Even if your local exchange hasn’t been upgraded, you’re simply too far away to get a service, or don’t want broadband by satellite, it’s possible to accelerate your dial up connection and get near broadband speeds.
One way is to switch to freewire.net and get download speeds up to five times faster than a standard dial up connection. Freewire is able to offer faster connectivity by compressing downloaded data so that it loads faster on the user’s computer.
There are no monthly subscription fees, just the call cost of dialling a 0845 number. Set up can be as straight-forward as changing your dial in number. Alternatively, download the ISP’s free software to optimise connection speeds and quicken POP3 email as well. Users also get unlimited email addresses and 50MB of web space.
Another option is Onspeed. This is a subscription service priced between £19.99 to £24.99 per year for mobile phone and dial up users that promises speeds of up to ten times faster than a 56k modem.
Both Freewire and Onspeed work by compressing the information you wish to download. What they don’t do is increase your bandwidth. The size of your ‘pipe’ remains the same, it’s the packets of data that gets smaller. Unfortunately, the technology is one way, uploading will still be slow. But it’s better, in the end, for the bucket to be half full than completely empty.
