Speed up dialin connection via proxy?

[John]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 10:54:23PM -0500, Timothy Luoma wrote:
> 
> I cannot get high speed internet access at home.  In fact, I can't get 
> more than about 26400 on my dialup.
> 
> My dialup is my FreeBSD machine (5.3).
> 
> I am wondering if I setup a proxy on the FreeBSD machine, if it would 
> speed downloads up any.  If so, what would be a good proxy to use?

A proxy can help only if you have a situation where you expect local
machines to each load the same pages - then the proxy can cache and
serve them on your local network rather than going back across your
outside link.  It won't do anything to help the original fetch of
the information, unfortunately.

> Anything else I could do to speed things up?

Modern modems are already doing some pretty sophisticated compression
techniques.  They do all sorts of things to try to get as much
across the line as possible.  They actually transfer data in
synchronous blocks to "skip over" the start and stop bits and then
reconstitute the asynchronous stream on the serial port side.

About all you can do is to find anything within your control that
is reducing the quality of the signal your modem can see (make
sure that all your wiring from the point of demarcation is new,
solid, and away from noise sources - like, not wrapped around
flourescent light fixture and things).

Other than that, I can't think of anything...

> TjL
-- 

John Lind
john at starfire.MN.ORG