High-speed Dial-up: The Bottom Line

Now that you understand how it works, let's take a moment to look at how well it works. We decided to try out one of the more popular high-speed dial-up providers, NetZero, to see how much the service sped up a dial-up connection.

After signing up for the service and choosing the "out of the box" settings, HowStuffWorks tooled around the Web with both normal and high-speed dial-up connections to test the difference in speed.

After log-in, we surfed repeatedly to some of the most popular sites on the Web. The results varied by site, but as an example, HowStuffWorks came up three times faster with high-speed dial-up. For the complete results, see the chart below.

With Dial-Up
With High Speed Dial-Up
Web Page
Original Load Time (seconds)
Web Page
Original Load Time (seconds)
Cached Load Time (seconds)
Amazon.com
49.29
Amazon.com
39.05
14.05
CNN.com
72.4
CNN.com
32.57
9.32
Ebay.com
57.68
Ebay.com
40.38
34.2
Google.com
8.08
Google.com
3.15
1.65
Google search (100 results)
10.45
Google search (100 results)
9
7.42
HowStuffWorks.com
92.3
HowStuffWorks.com
31.78
18.7
NetZero.com
33.26
NetZero.com
16.29
10.53
Yahoo.com
26.81
Yahoo.com
12.51
7.1

It would seem that a clever combination of fairly straightforward technologies has helped to overcome some of the speed bumps of dial-up Internet. These advances serve to prolong the life of dial-up Internet and provide an alternative for those who are tired of standard dial-up but not quite ready for the leap to broadband. If these advances continue, dial-up may be here to stay for quite a while.

For more information on high-speed dial-up and related topics, check out the links on the next page.