ISP Information:
A networking protocol initially designed to move multimedia data around with high reliability and speed. It uses small, fixed-size cells of data that can be more easily controlled and kept at specific service levels than TCP/IP. Some ISPs use ATM as the protocol for their backbones.
ISP Glossary:
Asynchronous Transfer Mode - AOL, Earthlink et al are advertising special services w/ higher prices and promising "up to" 5 X Times faster... Obviously claims like 'up to' make me suspicious. But given the benefit of the doubt - HOW do they accomplish this if one still has the same V.90 or V.92 modem, same central office, same phone line and dialing into (presumably) the same (digital?) modem bank?I can say from experience, this does work with any modem, V.92 orotherwise. My local ISP offers a similar service, and the connectionis V.90.The system they offer does 3 things (according to the info they sentwith it): it reduces the quality of the images, it caches data, andsomehow it compresses data differently for faster transmission. Idon't pretend to know all about it, but when I do a speed test atsomewhere like Toast.net or CNET.com, my transmission speed is around400k (when I turn the accelerator software off, the test comes back ataround 44k).Music and streaming videos seem faster, but I haven't been able to doa real test. I do know that, without the accelerator software turnedon, I get a lot of "buffering" when I go to Launch.com, but with thesoftware on I don't have that problem. Executables and zip files don'tdownload any faster at all, so I'm guessing that it depends on how thesoftware is compressed?General surfing, though, is a lot faster, and I'm not concerned aboutthe slightly lower quality graphics. I keep my resolution at 1152x864,and I don't notice the quality loss unless I pay close attention(although at 800x600 it would probably be more obvious).Finally, I've been able to answer a question here! After all thequestions I've asked, actually answering something is a goodfeeling...Mike
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