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OnSpeed
Price: £24 per year inc VAT

Features
Performance
Ease of use
Value for money
Overall

Reviewed By: Andy Shaw

This review updated: 29/03/2004
Featured in magazine:
Issue 78
Manufacturer Contacts:
Supplier: OnSpeed
Tel: 0870 7585 859
Web Address: www.onspeed.com


We have to admit to being more than a little cynical about services that claim to “speed up your internet connection”. After promises of body part enlargement and miracle hair restorers, it's a regularly spotted phrase in our spam mailbox. Since bandwidth has a finite capacity and we've never seen anything that actually works before, OnSpeed's claim of speeding dial-up connections to near-broadband levels, at a fraction of the price, sound like the shallow promise of a charlatan selling snake oil. We were invited to put it to the test. So we did.

Features
Whereas most internet speed improvers get their minor benefits out of tweaking settings here and there for incremental benefit, OnSpeed uses US military grade data compression to dramatically squeeze down the content of websites before it gets to you. As we well know, smaller files make quicker downloads, but it does necessitate a downward shift in the quality of things like the images you see.

Performance
In our tests, we got a vastly improved performance out of certain types of downloads. The best performance is on web pages made entirely of text and pictures. However, this doesn't come without compromise. We set the speed improvement to a sympathetic setting, which was improving our speed by about 3.5 times. At this setting, images are visibly degraded, with blurring and that muddy pixelisation you often see around the edges of compressed photos. It is possible to crank the compression up even more for greater speed, but we thought this impacted on our enjoyment of the web and was a poor compromise. Also, it doesn't do much to improve streaming media or sites heavily laden with snazzy technologies like Flash.

Ease of use
Thankfully, all the hardcore technical stuff is done for you. Installing OnSpeed is easy and you just have to decide whether you want it switched on and, if so, how much compression you want to apply. This is controlled by a simple slider bar and a graphical representation will show you how it's likely to affect your images.

Value for money
This is no rip-off – it actually works and is good value too. There's no point pretending it's a good replacement for broadband because it's not in the same league. However, it isn't in the same league as regards price either. So if you live in an area that can't receive broadband or simply aren't willing to pay the premium pricing, this is a cheap way of accelerating your browsing.

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