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General discussion

Has anyone heard of or used Turbo-net?

Feb 26, 2005 10:38PM PST

Gateway 400 Select PC; 160 MB RAM; Windows 98 SE; IE 6 SP1

Our ISP is offering a new thing called Turbonet. It will cost $1.95/mo. or $21/yr --- in addition to our monthly rate of $17/mo. They're giving us a 30-day free trial.

Thus far, I really like it because their claim to fame was it can improve downloading of pages UP TO 5 times as fast. Well ----- it's done that for us and then some. The information about it indicated that somehow they compress the data to make it load faster.

Things are still coming down the pike at 28800 bps ---- but somehow our pages are appearing instantaneously. We have many friends on cable and with turbonet, we're up there with the big boys (LOL)! I even compared it to what happens when I put a tik under Internet Options under don't display animations ---- and it is still much faster with the Turbonet.

I've inquired with our ISP re: how long they cache their pages as it must be something to do with that to make them "appear" to be coming in faster. Whatever it is, thus far I do like it and for our needs it might just be the thing.

Has anyone used this program or even heard of it? If so ----- do you like it?

Thank you.

Julea

Discussion is locked

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Turbo net
Mar 30, 2005 12:10AM PST

All any of these programs do is compress the page which degrades the graphics. downloads will not be any faster.

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Re: Turbo net
May 6, 2005 1:33AM PDT

Don't waste your money. Just more snake oil for the dial up people. Its basically a caching service. I won't waste alot of time on it other than save your money its really not worth it.

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Let me tell you a story
May 8, 2005 12:30AM PDT

Hi Julea,
I live in Sydney, Australia - well about 12 mths ago I found out my ISP in conjunction with the government were offering for a short period of time assistance to those dialup members who were only getting something like 2800bps. My ISP is our largest phone company whom up till about 10yrs ago was a government utility and as such had a monopoly - they still own the phone network and are 51% Gov owned.
Well I enquired about this so called "assistance" - I was told if after a technician checked my line and all appropriate measure had been taken to eliminate systems configuration problems I would receive the assistance. I spoke to a technician and ask "what kind of assistance - I was told compression software - From what he was saying this would make a significant difference - so my question was "why isn't it readily available" to which he replied - well because it's expensive because it's copyright - anyway to cut a long story short thins conversation went on a while - and I surmised from what he said was this software would require a major upgrade of the ISP hardware and this was not possible because they were hoping phase out dialup and introduce global broadband.
So to answer your question, if it is the same compression software, it appears it can make a significant increase to your through put.
Regards,
Peter

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Yes and No
May 16, 2005 1:30PM PDT

Psuedo techno BS. Sure its going to work if already you got some of the websites or repeated images already on your system. It just "appears" to work faster but really slight of hand. Any decent ISP out there is offering this stuff as an option, why not just give it away, free and make your ISp the toast of the town. Nope, they want more $ from the user for this magic service. But heck, if you're happy with the results, go for it. I switch around too often to new websites to benefit from it, but more importantly I'll not pay extra for the burden I already pay as it is.

adios -----Willy