Not for the first time, a company is offering to "transform your dial-up to near broadband speeds" by running compression software in the background. But two things are unusual about OnSpeed. First, it is a British company. Second, while its servers are awake, it actually works, though this doesn't necessarily mean I'd recommend it.
I tried it with ZD Net's free bandwidth speed tester. It was from a Telewest dial-up connection, and using OnSpeed increased the rating from 45.2kbps to 69.9kbps. Web pages were noticeably faster to download, particularly graphics-heavy ones presumably aimed at broadband users.
For example, OnSpeed reduced the download time for the image-heavy www.b3ta.com from a hopeless two minutes 15 seconds to an unacceptable 90 seconds. However, bear in mind that the system works by compressing the graphics, reducing their quality. This doesn't matter on the majority of sites, where the graphics have no useful function, but it may matter if you want to look at the pretty pictures. If so, OnSpeed has a slider control letting you increase the quality level and so reduce the speed.
Using OnSpeed with a BT Openworld 512K ADSL broadband connection increased the ZDNet speed rating from 490.3kbps to 769.8kbps. Again, web surfing was snappier, but in general use, the difference often seemed pretty marginal. On the B3ta site, for example, the download time was reduced from 16 seconds to 12 seconds. Sometimes the page seemed to take longer, but it was impossible to say whether the delay was caused by waiting for OnSpeed's servers to compress the site, or just the fact that web pages often hang for random reasons.
OnSpeed made no difference to the speed with download managers. When I downloaded a 23 megabyte XviD movie file, it took longer with OnSpeed running: seven minutes and four seconds compared with six minutes and 50 seconds. It also made no difference to streaming video. In other words, OnSpeed doesn't really replace a broadband "always on"connection, but it does speed up your web browser and email program.
Compressing pages on the fly is a very old idea: it's how the proprietary AOL service works. OnSpeed works better because it has better compression, though AOL has the advantage that with tens of millions of users, it can often serve up pages it has already compressed for someone else. Whether OnSpeed will be able to keep up the speed when its servers are deluged with users remains to be seen.
The other issue with programs such as OnSpeed is privacy, and its potential exploitation. If all your pages are going via OnSpeed then it knows what you are doing, and this information is valuable for serving advertisements. You should definitely read the privacy policy at www.onspeed.com/privacy.php before signing up, and that's why I will be signing off. A dial-up user might take a different view. OnSpeed costs £24.99 a year (Windows only at present) .