OnSpeed
Without a doubt one of the best add-ons you can buy to speed up a sluggish internet connection is OnSpeed. I suspect that many people have experienced poor internet speeds from time to time and seemingly always when you need to get something done quickly. Having a long phone line or picking the wrong ISP can make your broadband seem like treacle at times.

How OnSpeed works
It works in a similar way to the Datawind Pocket Surfer which makes GPRS speeds acceptable for full size webpages rather than just the pretty useless cut down WAP affairs which never really caught on. A local proxy server is installed on your PC and IE and optionally other browsers the install process recognises are configured to use that instead of connecting directly to the internet. Requests for web pages are directed to the OnSpeed servers which retrieve the page, compress it, and squirt the compressed data back to your machine where the local proxy software decompresses it and your browser displays the page.
So now instead of downloading 30k or more of text you only download 3k or so. There are also gains to be made with images - many non professional webmasters do not resize or properly compress images which they put online and for those OnSpeed can make some spectacular savings. If you are not over bothered with image quality you can crank up the compression and make big savings on every site but at the expense of blocky looking pictures - it's up to you to decide and of course this can be changed on-the-fly depending on what you need at the time.

My history with OnSpeed
I first bought OnSpeed several years back before my backwater exchange was enabled for ADSL and let the subscription lapse when I finally got broadband. Some sticky patches with the ADSL almost but not quite forced my hand into reinvesting even on broadband. I could probably have made some savings too by chosing a low usage account which are considerably cheaper and running with OnSpeed to remove the worries of exceeding the cap. Having sorted out my internal phone wiring and finally finding an excellent ISP I thought I would have no further need of OnSpeed. I was wrong...

OnSpeed with mobile broadband

My statistics from a mobile broadband session - a three time usage reduction

My Datawind Pocket Surfer made me realise just how handy it was to have access to the internet wherever I happened to be. The only problem being that the Pocket Surfer is not as quick and easy to use as a proper laptop. The mobile operators now offer internet access virtually anywhere through a USB dongle plugged into a laptop for £10 a month up. The problem is these connections may be called mobile broadband but the speeds can be way down on proper broadband plus they have quite low data allowances and often with exorbitant over-use charges. If you've read this far I hope by now you see the obvious solution to these two problems - www.Onspeed.com - at £24.99 for a year it really does make these services very practical and maybe they could even replace your conventional broadband package.

Important If you use FireFox 3 read this.