Tiscali promotes compression software to speed up its broadband

Tuesday 17 June 2008 09:16:42 by Andrew Ferguson

It seems somewhat odd for a broadband provider to promote a software solution that many people associate with dial-up internet connections. ONSPEED is a service that claims to provide up to five times faster speeds on your broadband connection but only if it is an up to 2Mbps connection.

The signing of an agreement between Tiscali UK and ONSPEED has emerged on ISPreview.co.uk and in theory could save Tiscali customers the £24.99 which is the annual subscription for the service.

ONSPEED works by using compression techniques on the text that forms the core of web pages, and re-samples JPEG, PNG and GIF images to deliver a more compressed version as a smaller file. What ONSPEED cannot do is increase the download speed of other files that have been previously compressed, such as MP3, Quicktime, AVI and MPEG files and also does not help with streaming video or downloads over FTP or peer to peer systems. It also does not compress any secure (HTTPS) webpage.

Web sites have this habit of increasing in size and complexity, but many sites make clever use of graphics to present a highly complex page and increasing the JPEG compression, while saving a little time, may make sites look less than ideal.

The critics will very quickly be questioning whether this deal is about Tiscali UK providing consumers a better service or making bigger use of caching and re-sampling to reduce load on their network. It may possibly delay investment in more network capacity until such time as the current Tiscali sale is completed.