The Real Deal with 'Accelerated' Dial-up

Before we begin, however, I wanted to address a relatively new form of dial-up connection called 'accelerated' dial-up. You've probably seen it advertised in commercials and some of you may even be using it right now. First of all, let's make it clear that accelerated dial-up is not a form of broadband internet. All ISP's should state this in one way or another on their web sites. Broadband internet is a general term used for any high data-transmission rate internet connection. Common industry perception is that anything over 512 Kbps (Kilobits per second or kbits/s) is broadband when in actuality, the FCC defines broadband as anything over 200 Kbps while the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) classifies it as anything upwards of the 150 Kbps to 200 Kbps range. To put these speeds in perspective, a standard V.90 dial-up modem will allow you to browse the web at a maximum speed of 56 Kbps, dependent on both the hardware your ISP provides, and the quality of your phone line.

It's important to realize that accelerated dial-up still transfers data at the same rate as standard dial-up using your normal phone line. The primary reason your surfing experience is accelerated is because your ISP 'predicts' the pages that you will visit and caches or stores them on its network. Since these cached pages are already downloaded, the appearance is that you are actually surfing at faster speeds. Your ISP is making use of what is called a 'cached network'. Most web accelerators also use a compression algorithm to compress certain text and images before they are transfered to you across the phone line. The accelerator software that you install on your PC will then uncompress the text data. The images themselves cannot be uncompressed, because the only way to compress an image is to reduce it's quality. Once the quality is reduced, there is no way to undo the process. So essentially, your ISP uses a gif or jpeg optimizer on its end before transferring the data to you. Another thing that the accelerator does is to constantly communicate between your modem and the network to make sure the connection is optimal.

While this is wonderful for web browsing and web-based email retrieval, typically to the tune of another $5.00 or $6.00 per month, file transfer times, streaming media transfer times and secure page download times remain identical to what you experience with standard dial-up. In the world of internet business, faster surfing speeds do not compensate for faster data transfer rates. Accelerated dial-up will not provide any benenfit for your internet business.

I don't want to make it sound like the ISPs are trying to pull one over on the public, even though their advertising can be a bit misleading. If you read the full description of the accelerator services, along with the fine print, they actually admit to everything we just discussed. The only thing that really bothers me is that they claim in one way or another that email retrieval on the web is faster in addition to surf speeds. Well it's the on the web part that they know most people will not catch. This means web-based email like Yahoo or Hotmail are faster. The email you'll be using for your business such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape or Eudora will still be as slow as ever. Some ISPs do a good job of explaining this, while others are a bit more vague.

At this point, I hope you realize that accelerated dial-up is not a substitute for broadband when considering your home internet business. Let's now move on to a comparison of the different flavors of high speed internet.

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