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The internet has become such a vital resource in our personal and
business lives that to be without it seems unthinkable. Many of us
suffer withdrawal symptoms if we can't get online or "check our e-mail"
at least once a day. This still poses a problem if you are travelling.
Your first choice will always be to find a wireless connection
(McDonalds now famously offer free Wi-Fi access in their restaurants -
smart move). Failing that there's the 3G phone network where data
speeds akin to DSL are available. To benefit from 3G you need either
a contract with one of the mobile providers (e.g. Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile, 3, O2 - in which case you'll
usually get a free USB modem to access the service) or you can buy a
modem and, if you are a very occasional user, some carriers have a no contract pay per day rate (eg T-mobile).
All this is
fine, and there are many people who now don't have landlines or fixed
ADSL but rely entirely on wireless for phones and data, but 3G is not
available everywhere. The fall back then is GPRS - the original mobile
data service which is available pretty much everywhere there is mobile
coverage (some countries may vary). GPRS has speeds somewhat less than
a dial up modem (<56kbps receiving, <14kbps sending) so is a bit
of a disaster for normal web browsing. GPRS does have an advantage over
dial up in that it can be always on, you are charged for how much data
you pass, not for how long you are connected.
In an attempt to make
GPRS usable for web browsing I have been trialing ONSPEED , this is a system that installs itself as a proxy between your browser and the internet. ONSPEED
retrieves the pages you have requested, compresses them before
transmission and then they are uncompressed
for display by software on your pc or laptop. Pages are displayed as soon as the basic HTML is loaded and more complex content such as images load progressively afterwards. This means if you hit a page you can tell pretty quickly if it's what you want without waiting for all the graphics to load. A powerful feature is the ability to reduce the file size of
pictures by reducing image quality. If you are on a really slow
connection getting the page to load at all is preferable to waiting
for hours for pin sharp graphics.
I have been experimenting using a
blue-tooth connected mobile phone as a GPRS modem on my laptop, and have
seen data compression, and hence speed improvements, of up to 7x. I
would say that the results make GPRS usable in this context where a
reduction in data also means a significant reduction in cost. Speed benefits can
also be seen with the slower variants of ADSL and, of course, dial-up.
ONSPEED
comes with a system tray utility that allows you to monitor
connectivity and performance. There's also a toolbar for Internet Explorer
that gives you an instant view of what's going on. This looks handy but irritatingly includes it's own search box which doesn't want to switch off, and I'm not convinced about how stable it is. There is as yet no toolbar for Firefox but I think probably better off without.
A final point to remember is that ONSPEED is a proxy, so your pc is not communicating directly with the website you are browsing, but with ONSPEED's proxy service. This may cause issues if you employ site blocking software downstream, and may mean that sites using your IP address as an indication of your location don't function as expected. If that happens just turn ONSPEED off. Same applies if you need to access web servers inside your firewall (eg intranet) as the ONSPEED proxy won't be able to access them.
If you are stuck
with a slow network connection, or find yourself on the road and having to resort to
GPRS or dial-up, it's worth checking out www.onspeed.com.
For a comparison of mobile broadband packages available in the UK look here.
UPDATE: 15/09/08
Image compression with T-Mobile web 'n' walk stick
There has been some fuss on bloggs, forums and computer press about the default image compression applied by some 3G mobile data providers (Vodaphone and T-Mobile particularly). This compression does exactly the same job as ONSPEED, using a proxy to compress data before transmission across the network. The default setting on T-Mobile reduces the quality of images to an unacceptable level for my liking, but by using ONSPEED the T-Mobile proxy was overridden and I was able to control just how much compression I could tolerate. All these 3G cards drop back to GPRS when there's no 3G coverage in which case you'd want to use maximum compression. With good 3G coverage, or in situations where you need the graphics quality, ONSPEED makes it easy to turn compression off. If you don't want to sign up for ONSPEED, T-Mobile provide a free down-loadable utility that controls the compression across their network. Called the Web'n'Walk Accelerator it's down-loadable from the company's website here .
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