Can you speed up dial up?

OK we know that the claims that Earthlink is making here are nothing that wouldn't be available to anyone that does some digging.
It looks like some kind of download accelerator software.

Anyone here have an idea on how to speed up dial up?

[DoctorReno]

To my knowledge most dial up ISPs utilize an MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) of 576. By default Windows sets the MTU for 1500 which is the networking standard. This causes all of your information packets to become fragmented which causes errors. By resending info eventually you do transfer the information successfully. By configuring your MTU and a few related settings correctly you in effect speed up your connection because of having to communicate back and forth fewer times to successfully transfer the info.
Other than that most of these download accelerators and ISP caching ideas are mere scams. People are gullible and can easily be convinced that their speeds have increased a couple hundred percent. Some unscrupulous ISP's are now charging up to 50% more for their caching scams and actually advertise broadband speeds on dial-up.
Only objective benchmarks can show increases.
Hope this helps.

Juno has been offering some of the same type service. Appaerntly what they do is cache a larger amount of information and compress images slightly better than normal speeding up the transmition that way. As for optimizing connections speeds here's a thread where we hit on most of the key points with a few links for some ideas as to what to do

http://www.techimo.com/forum/t72940.html

and happy b-day

[DoctorReno]

Juno is one of the unscrupulous ISPs I was referring to. They and their sister ISP charge 50% more for a service most ISPs offer for free. It's a total rip off. I would suspect that at some point they will have to quit advertising the part about getting broadband speeds with dial-up.
I have heard some stories about this caching method that bothers me. Apparently many ISPs do not refresh the cache often and certain sites that have constantly changing info, say news sites, when you go the the site you will be linked to the old outdated cached page rather than the new updated page.

yeah its a total scam I'm not suggesting using that type of service just pointing to them as an example. Realistically you should get the same result by caching larger amounts of files on your own computer, the draw back being that it will eventually slow down your PC. If you really wanted to speed up surfing on dial-up turn all images of use something like mozilla that allows you to turn of flash so your just getting the text side of the pages and it should be about as fast as you could go.

won't look the best but it would be affective.

[DoctorReno]

Amen

Originally posted by DoctorReno
Juno is one of the unscrupulous ISPs I was referring to. They and their sister ISP charge 50% more for a service most ISPs offer for free.

Amen to that!
Earthlink is charging 30 bucks a month for this new faster service and I think it's a bunch of crock. I've tweaked dial up settings in the past and never seen the kind of difference ( or much of any for that matter) they are claiming.
That's why I was thinking they are using something else.

[DoctorReno]

And in many peoples opinion Earthlink used to be one of the better, more reliable dial-up ISP's albiet pricy. Guess they just had to jump on the scam wagon eventually.

[Bob The Great]

Originally posted by DoctorReno
Juno is one of the unscrupulous ISPs I was referring to. They and their sister ISP charge 50% more for a service most ISPs offer for free. It's a total rip off. I would suspect that at some point they will have to quit advertising the part about getting broadband speeds with dial-up.

For Juno be unscrupulous I think your tottaly wrong. They offer $9.99 internet service that is amazing! I leave it on all night downloading and I never get kicked off. Its amazingly fast and like I mentioned only ten bucks a month.

This cached stuff is interesting sounding but not really worth it for most people. They only charge an extra $5 a month for it though so its not like your children aren't going to be able to eat that month if you try it out.

As for there advertising it being broadband speeds I think they do give it to much credit. It might be slightly faster but not the 5X they say in many ads. Also like what somone mentioned already if its not updated enough your going to get old info and that sucks.

[DoctorReno]

I agree that their basic service is not bad, however that is not what we were talking about in this thread.
I WOULD call preying on the gullibility of the unknowing public by advertising false speed increases and creating a separate ISP to market this and a BS technology and charging extra for all of the above when most other ISP's charge nothing ... UNSCRUPULOUS But that is just my humble opinion.