How fast is dial up connection

Or, if the house is miles away from the ISP, this can contribute to slower transfer speeds as well. Because of a dial-up connection's high latency—the time lag experienced in a system—it is nearly impossible to watch video or play online games.

While there are games out there that have adapted and allow for dial-up connection speeds, many newer games that are being released don't even give the option for the user to play the game with a dial-up connection.

In an effort to keep dial-up customers, ISPs created a system where a website would be compressed right before sent over the phone line. The ISPs marketed this as high speed dial-up. However, the downfall was that the quality of the images that were sent decreased. Therefore, if a user wanted to see the higher quality images, they had to wait for it to download. Until it is economical to build broadband lines in those remote locations, people are stuck with dial-up connections.

It is anticipated that as more broadband is made available to remote locations that fewer people will even consider using dial-up. While speed is the most noticeable difference once you buy the internet, the biggest difference while shopping for internet will be the price.

The factor that influences price the most is the speed. Starting with dial up, it can several minutes to load your email or web pages. High speed internet is quite the opposite.

Dial up is very slow as you may have noticed by now , but it can be made worse when others logon using the same service. Dial up is also known for cutting out or the internet quitting intermittently, which is made worse by things like volume of users and weather. And with cable the speed can decrease if others are using the internet at the same as you. Watching paint dry would be a more exciting task than using dial up internet. Here are my thoughts:. High-speed dial-up uses a similar system for commonly requested Web pages.

Instead of constantly requesting the same page, the acceleration server takes note of which Web pages are being commonly asked for by all subscribers. Then it stores the page in its memory, and every time another subscriber asks to see HowStuffWorks, it simply transmits the page out of its memory to the user.

This is called server-side caching , and it saves time by eliminating redundant requests. There is a second side to caching -- client-side caching. Internet browsers like Explorer or Netscape are made to cache frequently viewed pages to cut down on load times. The browser stores the cached pages on your computer's hard disk. High-speed dial-up software enhances this feature. In addition to storing frequently viewed pages, it also looks for elements in those pages that remain constant.

For instance, instead of caching the entire HowStuffWorks homepage, most of which changes every day, it looks for things that don't change. On our homepage, the logo, the header, the navigation, and the search bar stay the same every day.

The software makes note of that consistency, saves those elements, and then only loads what has changed every time you come to the HowStuffWorks homepage. You can see how caching saves time by avoiding unnecessary data transmission. The most amazing thing about this tool is that with the combination of server-side caching and client-side caching, the system learns about your surfing habits.

It uses what it learns to streamline your connection process as much as possible. So the more you use it, the faster it gets. Compression, filtering and caching are the three key steps in dial-up acceleration.

But what actually happens when you put all three techniques together? Does performance really improve? And is the improvement enough to be noticeable? The answer is yes, and in the next section we will try out NetZero to see how well it actually works with real-world Web pages.

Now that you understand how it works, let's take a moment to look at how well it works. We decided to try out one of the more popular high-speed dial-up providers, NetZero , to see how much the service sped up a dial-up connection.

After signing up for the service and choosing the "out of the box" settings, HowStuffWorks tooled around the Web with both normal and high-speed dial-up connections to test the difference in speed. After log-in, we surfed repeatedly to some of the most popular sites on the Web. The results varied by site, but as an example, HowStuffWorks came up three times faster with high-speed dial-up. It would seem that a clever combination of fairly straightforward technologies has helped to overcome some of the speed bumps of dial-up Internet.

These advances serve to prolong the life of dial-up Internet and provide an alternative for those who are tired of standard dial-up but not quite ready for the leap to broadband. If these advances continue, dial-up may be here to stay for quite a while. For more information on high-speed dial-up and related topics, check out the links on the next page. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots.

Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. How High-speed Dial-up Works. A PTT employee explains to a customer about subscribing to the new high-speed internet service at the post office in Hanoi, Vietnam. See more Internet connection pictures. High-speed Dial-up: Acceleration Servers " ". High-speed dial-up allows your machine to establish a connection with your ISP in a fraction of the time it takes with standard dial-up.

Your machine: Hello, my name is Sparky. Your machine: I am John's computer. ISP Server: John who? Your machine: John Smith.