September 29th, 2009
EarthLink big plan to make dial-up faster: Use mobile sites
EarthLink is using a novel way to boost dial-up access speeds—use mobile versions of Web sites.
The company’s announcement that it could dramatically boost dial-up speeds sounded interesting. After all EarthLink said that it could “speed of the online experience for dial-up Internet access users by up to 80%.”
The details, however, were a bit of a letdown. In a nutshell, EarthLink is launching a “faster site finder” feature in the EarthLink Toolbar that alerts users when a faster version of the site is available. That faster version is typically the mobile version of a site.
EarthLink notes that mobile versions of popular Web sites give you an 81 percent speed boost over a 53.2 kbps dial-up connection.
The company says:
Using the EarthLink Toolbar to identify faster sites can reduce page load times in certain instances from 4 minutes to less than 30 seconds, as some faster sites loaded as quickly as 10 seconds over a dial-up connection.
Now the natural inclination for folks is to laugh at EarthLink’s focus on dial-up speeds, but the company has more than 1 million subscribers. In addition, there are 10 million to 12 million people that still use dial-up access. AOL and EarthLink consider these folks a nice recurring revenue stream.
Also see:
- Happy 30th birthday, Compuserve
- AOL’s Armstrong: Dial-up matters (a lot)
- Dial-up Internet access: A fine business to milk?
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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