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If you surf the Internet using a dial-up connection, you are painfully
aware of how slow Web pages load. Propel Accelerator is a
subscription-based service that works with any dial-up connection,
allowing you to increase your surfing speed up to 5 times. So, pages that
previously took almost 30 seconds to load, can now be viewed in less than
7 seconds, on average.
Sign-up now!
About Propel
Propel is focused on solving a problem that affects approximately 50
million U.S. Internet users: slow Internet dial-up connections. In July of
2002, Propel launched a new service to address this issue - Propel
Accelerator, which speeds up dial-up browsing by up to 5 times. Now the
world's fastest way to surf over dial-up, Propel Accelerator has received
critical acclaim from reviewers at the Washington Post, the Mercury News,
and has won Industry awards such as CNET's Editor's Choice and ZDNet
Editor's Choice awards.
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Web Surfing Made Faster
October 10, 2002
As I pointed out in a recent column, only about 10 percent of Americans
have signed up for a cable modem or DSL even though such broadband
services greatly increase the speed of surfing the Net. Some people just
don't want to spend the money -- typically between $39 and $50 a month --
while others live in an area where service isn't available.
Now there is an alternative that, though not as fast as broadband, is at
least twice the speed of a standard modem. And you don't need any special
lines or equipment to use it.
Propel is a subscription service that can dramatically increase the speed of a
standard dial-up connection. For $5 a month, the service connects you to
the company's server, which, along with software you download to your PC,
helps speed things up. Even though you're connecting to the company's
server, Propel isn't an Internet service provider. The service works with
just about any ISP, including AOL, as long as you have version 6.0 or
higher of the AOL software.
Installation is a breeze. I had the software installed and was enjoying
the extra speed in a matter of minutes. The service works on Windows XP,
98, ME, 2000 and NT 4.0, but it doesn't yet work with the Mac.
Unlike many programs that claim to speed up Web surfing, this one actually
works. It does it in three ways. First, it compresses graphics and text so
that they are delivered more quickly to your PC. It also caches (stores)
frequently used Web pages so that they pop up almost instantaneously.
Finally, while you're online, the Propel software maintains a persistent
connection between your PC and the company's servers so that you don't
have to re-establish a connection each time your browser makes a request.
There is nothing unusual about any of these technologies. Internet
Explorer and Netscape already cache pages, and there are lots of programs
out there that will compress graphics. Yet Propel is able to do these
things far more intelligently because of the cooperation between the
software on your machine and the company's servers.
I tested Propel with both AOL and Earthlink and noticed an improvement in
both cases. My AOL performance was about twice the speed while the
performance on Earthlink was about three times as fast as it would have
been without Propel running. The company claims that "web pages load an
average of 3 to 5 times faster," but in my initial tests I noticed an
improvement of about 2 1/2 times the speed using AOL and about three times
the speed using Earthlink. However, as I used it a bit more, things
started to speed up because the intelligent caching system was storing an
increasing number of Web page elements from the sites I visit the most.
I usually focus my reviews strictly on the products, rather than the
personalities involved, but the founder and CEO of Propel is a pretty
unique guy. Steve Kirsch
has been around Silicon Valley since the early '80s and was the founder
and CEO of Infoseek, which was later acquired by Disney and transformed
into Go.com. He's also a philanthropist (he co-founded the Kirsch
Foundation, which supports several social causes) and political activist
who, among other things, has been funding and waging a campaign against
spam and junk faxes.
His company's service is not magic. It won't speed up your e-mail or
downloading of files and it won't turn your dial-up connection into a DSL
or cable modem. Still, if surfing the Web is annoyingly slow and broadband
isn't in your immediate future, this is a worthwhile option. You can get a
free 30-day subscription to try it for yourself.
Sign-up now! |
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