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DSL Speeds Over Dialup?
Find out if Proxyconn can really deliver DSL speeds over a dial-up connection.
By Phil Allingham
DSL speeds over a regular dial-up account... that's about as enticing an offer as you'll ever hear. If you're a road warrior, or a cost-conscious consumer, it might seem like nirvana. So it doesn't come as much surprise when one of our dedicated and curious viewers asked us about Proxyconn, one of the most aggressive providers of this type of service.
If you spend any time on the Internet you've probably seen one of its banner ads, or received an email from Proxyconn. The Proxyconn service costs about $9 per month. You download a piece of software, install it, and then you're off speeding down the information superhighway at breakneck speeds. That's the theory.
Here's the reality.
Your absolute connection speed never changes. Whatever speed you connect to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is your connection speed. What Proxyconn promises is "increased surfing speed," which I interpret to mean, "You see the pages you want to see in the same time as if you were using a DSL account".
Here's how Proxyconn purports to get that done.
Banner ad removal.
Pop-up removal.
Using a proxy connection via a local host to provide improved caching of the websites you visit, making return visits faster.
Dedicated servers: The proxy connection reroutes HTTP requests to one of Proxyconn's six domestic US servers that will deliver HTTP data to you faster than your ISP.
Data compression: Data between your machine and their servers to increase the amount of data that reaches your PC.
How Proxyconn calculates speed
Proxyconn even goes as far as to show your "Effective Speed." This is a calculation of how fast Proxyconn thinks your connection is performing. In my experience, Proxyconn estimated my 44 Kbps connection was performing like a 181 Kbps connection. Having talked with the developer, the calculation is based on how much data is removed from the page via banner ads combined with the compression ratio, and the number of cached versus uncached pages visited. I wouldn't believe this number if Abe Lincoln did the math. It's just too subjective.
The truth about Proxyconn
Proxyconn claims to remove banners and kill pop-up. That's easy to notice and it works. However, there are hundreds of freeware alternatives that work just as well. So while that's nice, it's not worth the money.
The locally hosted proxy is true. HTTP requests are routed to IP address 127.0.0.1, which is your own PC. What we're supposed to believe happens after this is hard for an average user to prove or disprove. In this case, the local proxy server caches more webpages than Internet Explorer would normally. If the page isn't cached, the proxy server requests it from Proxyconn's own servers. HTTP data is compressed and returned to the local proxy server that decompressed that data and serves that to your Web browser.
What's wrong with this picture?
That all seems possible. But there are a few flaws. First, much Web content is already compressed, including broadband favorites like image, audio, and video file formats such as JPEG, MPEG, and MP3. So any attempt to recompress will have little value. Text can be compressed, but is quite small to begin with -- and remember normal HTML is just a text file with special characters. Proxyconn's "conventional wisdom" that a proxy server system is faster for cached data may also work against it. Users may get uncached data at slower speeds because there's a double request involved.
So, is Proxyconn service worth $9 per month? No. The nominal speed increases don't live up the advertising, and the additional money would be better spent on a true DSL connection. In the three days since I talked to the developer, Proxyconn's website has changed the language on the site from "DSL speed" to "near broadband speed." So while it's harder to dispute Proxyconn's claims, it's not hard to figure out 181 Kbps is only 48 percent of my 384 Kbps DSL connection.
Originally posted December 24, 2002
