Wanadoo booster, any tips?

[Ron Avery]

For those of us in the sticks awaiting Broadband, some months ago Wanadoo offered a download accelerator called booster, it cost €3 per month.  Wanadoo have now incorporated Booster in their dial up contracts for free, but changed the icon to an arrow

For some sites it is faster but I now find that booster often takes me to error 401 sites and/or a site called interrnet optimiser instead of the URL I want, (including on this site) but if I disable booster it finds the originally selected site without any problem, albeit a little slower.

 

Anyone else having problems?  Is it worth having?

 

 

[jorja]

hi

despite being told when we moved here that we would have adsl within a couple of months it now turns out that it will be a couple of years!! so we signed up for onspeed. www.onspeed.com

it's not as fast as broadband nor does it free up your phone line, but it definitely does speed things up much more. it only costs £25 per year (approx) and is well worth it.

another option that i am looking into is sat broadband. check out www.ses-astra.com

i would be very grateful to hear whether anyone has had sucess with this and what it involves. ie. does it free up your phone line. meanwhile i can recomend onspeed.

jorja

[savanatbunnie]

[quote]For those of us in the sticks awaiting Broadband, some months ago Wanadoo offered a download accelerator called booster, it cost €3 per month. Wanadoo have now incorporated Booster in their dial up c...[/quote]

I have changed to AOL.  I find them much faster than Wanadoo, and get 100 hours for 19.90 a month, with free virus checker on the email.  Wanadoo started charging 3 E a month for cirus checking my mail, and 3E a month for a speed booster, making about 27 euros a month I think. I found absolutely no difference with their booster at all, and stopped it the next month.  I too use Onspeed which I think helps a bit. All  I can say is roll on ADSL.  I also got very annoyed with Wanadoo, when I emailed them with a techie problem, they only ever sent back a standard letter referring me to their 400 FAQ's. No help at all, if the answer lay therein, I wouldnt have asked them for help.

[Mazan]

All these dial-up boosters work (if I dare use the word) pretty much the same way. They reduce the resolution of web images before transmitting them and use other caching techniques. They are all useless for anything other than webpages and don't work particularly well for that.

Free is about the right price to pay.

One of the big drawbacks is the increased likelihood of 404-not found errors.

[Richardbk]

another option that i am looking into is sat broadband. check out www.ses-astra.com

I am currently investigating this. In france www.astranet.fr appears to offer the best service. router type modem to enable easy connection to home network, unlimited download etc. However, remember that for the cheaper one way systems, the outgoing call request is made by your exisiting ISP , so the cost is the cost of the sat service  + your exisiting ISP. In addition you can not run some services through the connection - e.g VPN. Also note that the avalable download bandwidth works on a policy of 'fair use'. This means that during certain times of the day - evening - it is likely that the download speed will be dramatically reduced - nearly all providers accept this is the case.

regs

 

Richard

 

 

[Hegs]

>They are all useless for anything other than webpages and don't work particularly well for that.

I disagree strongly, at least with respect to ISDN users.

I have OnSpeed on two computers on ISDN (where there is no native compression) running for over a year now, I have resubscribed. As part of my job I sometimes have to review tens of random web pages per day and it was a nightmare before. The performance improvement is extremely good, usually the reported improvement is more than 5x and I would agree with that. There has only been one web site that caused a problem

Also OnSpeed also compresses email transactions over the public net, I don't use that as I use a corporate email behind a firewall.

If you are fundamentally offended by images appearing slightly blurry but several times faster (note there is an option to refresh the page with all images showing), you can disable that and "just" rely on the lossless 5x compression of the web pages.

Now, if you are not using ISDN and have a V92 modem then there might be limited benefits as those already do good web page compression.

[jorja]

just a little update on ses-astra.fr .... we signed up for it with skybynet and were eagerly awaiting delivery of our dish and modem having been promised it within 48H (yeah right!!). after 4 days waiting in i finally rang the 0.34€ a min helpline and asked what was happening. they said it may come friday or saturday - 7 or 8 days later. anyway tomorrow is friday, so you never know. i'll let you know how it goes. we run our business off the net so i can't wait (not to mention the downloads i miss!!).

jorja

[Mazan]

They are all useless for anything other than webpages and don't work particularly well for that.

I disagree strongly, at least with respect to ISDN users.

I've seen some of these systems working on regular dial-up and ISDN. I've tested some of them myself on ISDN and they certainly had no effect on emails or file transfers. They are probably worth the money when they are free but I would never pay for them. I'm not surprised that Wanadoo now give the service away.
Maybe the system you use is better than the ones I've seen.

[Mazan]

we signed up for it with skybynet ..... we run our business off the net so i can't wait (not to mention the downloads i miss!!).

I suppose that you mean NetBySky rather than SkyByNet?

What are you intending to do about the return path? This satellite offer is unidirectional.

For running a business (depending on the kind of business) I would look more at ISDN and a decent unlimited daytime forfait.

You seem to be hoping to use this to download files also. Somehow I can't see the bandwidth keeping up with user numbers at 256k/20€, let alone at higher speeds. Satellite transponders just aren't suitable for such use.

[Hegs]

Mazan,

OnSpeed has been highly rated by pretty much every UK net magazine I can think of, including Which? Magazine Online (Best Buy), .net magazine (5 Star Rating), Internet Advisor  (Best Buy Award 5/5), PC Answers Magazine (Editors choice), PC Advisor Magazine (Gold award) and a load of others. You can see the reviews http://www.onspeed.com/en/reviews/index.php , at least two of which I have on paper so I know they are genuine.

Of course they *did* look at the product before passing judgement, maybe you should too :-)

 

 

 

 

 

[Mazan]

OnSpeed has been highly rated by pretty much every UK net magazine I can think of, including Which? Magazine Online (Best Buy),

Many magazines are full of recommendations for total rubbish. They often get paid for doing this (directly or indirectly.) I've seen magazines that contain articles recommending cars written by Jeremy Clarkson and you couldn't get more pointless than that, could you? I've even seen computer magazines that don't give the cost per page for ink use when reviewing printers, surely the single most important feature.

Which? say that they don't get paid but their criteria are often very debatable. I remember them not recommending a good vacuum cleaner simply because it was noisy. This is rather silly as most people buy a vacuum cleaner to clean with, not to use during a dinner party.