High-speed Dial-up: Acceleration Servers

When you search for a Web page on the Internet, your request is routed though your ISP to the Web. After making a series of stops along the way at machines that help find the page you're looking for, your machine is connected to the computer that serves the Web page you requested. Once this connection is established, data can flow freely from the Web server to your computer. Once the information leaves the Web server and hits your dial-up connection, that's where the bottleneck begins in the typical Internet transaction.

Dial-up Presence According to an independent study done by thePew Internet & American Life Project, in 2003 they were 147 million Internet users in the United States. Of those, 23 million had dial-up Internet service.

But high-speed dial-up providers have come up with some pretty clever ways to open up that bottleneck. By loading special software into a server, they turn it into what they call an acceleration server. And by sandwiching the acceleration server into the chain between your dial-up connection and the Web, they can speed up the process considerably.

When you search for a Web page using high-speed dial-up, your request is sent from the dial-up modem in your computer to the ISP's acceleration server. Now the acceleration server is requesting and serving pages on your behalf. The acceleration server uses a broadband connection to quickly search the Internet for the server that hosts the page you're looking for. Once it finds that server, the two machines start talking and exchanging the information you need. Your ISP's acceleration server takes that information and sends it to your machine.

The high-speed dial-up data path

Acceleration servers speed up the dial-up data transfer using several techniques:

• Compression
• Filtering
• Caching

Next, we'll go over how these acceleration servers drop the pedal on your dial-up.