'onspeed' too good to be true?

[Tracee]

Does anyone know if Onspeed (www.onspeed.com) has a catch - spyware, for example. There's nothing in the FAQ. Thanks!

[lisaj]

No catch except for the fact that it's complete rubbish... They're selling it as a broadband alternative, where in fact all they do is compress what can be compressed before sending it to you. Now, if all you view is HTML you might achieve the 5x speed they're claiming since it can be readily compressed. Any JPEGs, MP3s, or any other compressed media however will still come down your modem as fast as it can carry the data... Now if you don't intend to use the line to get anything other than textual HTML, that's not a problem...

[Tracee]

I guess the answer to my question is 'yes' then - thank you. How daft that they use a picture as the speed test then :\ good on em for trying though!

[ONSPEED]

Sorry the answers above are incorrect, ONSPEED compresses text by up to 10 times and also JPEG and GIF's by up to 5 times this is done via patented compression algorithms. We also compress MS Office files and PDF files the same way. We are working on MP3's and MPEG's for release in the next few months. ONSPEEd works on Dial-up (both Standard and ISDN), GPRS, and Mid Band (Broadband) connections.