Dial-up question

[Blacktharne]

I live in the country and I love it - the one downside being that I don't have access to broadband...Dial-up drives me mad at times...

Anyhow, I currently have dial-up through my phone company and it isn't all that consistent...40kbps seems to be top end and I often connect at slower speeds (according to the connection service icon in the taskbar anyhow)...

I see these netzero 3G adds on tv and wonder if its worth switching over ("you won't believe its not broadband!!!")...Is it even possible that netzero could be faster than my current provider? Aren't they limited by the quality of the phone line? Even if not, I'm still limited to 56Kpbs, right?

Thanks for helping out...

Oh and if anyone works for SBC, maybe you could pull some strings and get a sub-station-thing or whatever its called, get one of those out here so that I can have DSL

 

[Freejack2]

It's compressing the web pages from what I understand. Yes web pages will load faster but I'm not sure if it even tries to compress anything else. Your other choice if you don't mind the expensive up front cost is satellite internet. My in-laws have it and my brother in law can play WOW just fine on it.

 

[Looney]

Yes, your connection speed itself is dependent on the quality of the call and how well your modem handles that quality. Netzero may have what's called 'high-speed dialup', which is just a fancy way of saying they cache popular sites on their proxies, and uses compression technology to compress those sites more efficiently. Your connection speed itself will be similar, but the actual browsing speed MAY be faster. The experience may be slightly different than a normal dialup though, for instance, if you go to CNN.COM, they may have cached that site and reduced all the pics from color to grey and white instead, or make the pics smaller. Google has this service for free too: http://webaccelerator.google.com/

 

[BurnItDwn]

NETWORKING

Also,
you won't get more than 56kbit through netzero.

They compress the hell out of things and precatch them so surfing the web is quicker.
The "up to 3 times faster" just means "we compress things so it takes less time to surf since the compresd data is smaller"

Downloading binaries, zips, etc will take just as long as any other connection
Game pings and packet loss will not be any better then through any other dial up connection.

 

[Blacktharne]

 

[Blacktharne]

Alright, that makes sense...

I'm mostly annoyed by dial-up in a gaming context, and it doesn't appear that netzero will help that...

Freejack, I've thought about satellite, but when I looked into it previously I was told that satellite connections operated by sending bursts or packets of information and that was hell on gaming, even worse than dail-up...Can anyone else out there verify that satellite works well for online gaming?

 

[NikPreviousAcct]

Originally posted by: Blacktharne
Alright, that makes sense...

I'm mostly annoyed by dial-up in a gaming context, and it doesn't appear that netzero will help that...

Freejack, I've thought about satellite, but when I looked into it previously I was told that satellite connections operated by sending bursts or packets of information and that was hell on gaming, even worse than dail-up...Can anyone else out there verify that satellite works well for online gaming?

If the satellite technology says "I send bursts of packets not a steady transmission" why would any one satellite company be different than another? I don't know much about the technology behind satellite internet connections, but if that's how satellite functions, then that's how satellite functions.

Do you not have access to cable or DSL?

 

[plastick]

dial up is only good for starcraft gaming.. and even then, it disconnects.. just run a cat5 cable to a friends house in town :thumbsup:

 

[plastick]

hey i just thought of something.. if you have direct tv, they offer satellite internet for reasonable price (i think)