Is It Misleading To Call A Dialup Accelerator Broadband?

from the seems-like-it dept

These days many dialup providers have been offering “accelerators” for an additional fee (the technology is often provided by the company Propel, though there are a few others out there as well). These work by using caching and compression to make certain webpages appear faster – though, it doesn’t actually speed up your connection at all. Now, popular cheap dialup up provider Joi Internet is being sued by BellSouth for false advertising, by claiming that their accelerated dialup is “DSL speed” and showing a commercial that implies it’s even faster than BellSouth’s DSL. Joi responds by making this into a David vs. Goliath style battle and claims that none of their customers have complained. Still, in this case, BellSouth has a point. The accelerated dialup is not DSL-speed at all, and implying that it is (or that it’s faster than DSL) is clearly misleading.


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Comments on “Is It Misleading To Call A Dialup Accelerator Broadband?”

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Red_Eye says:

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Awesome! The one thing that needs to be made clear to joe newbie is that you cant compress an already compressed piece of data. So jpg,mp3,zip, newer office documents, etc all will travel at the same or in a worst case scenario (if the protocol used is lame enough) things could run slower as it tries to compress the data and winds up making you tranfer the original file and the compression data….

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