What is "high-speed access?" I'm suspicious, since these ISP's don't own any transmission. Is it worth paying a bit more a month, or is it BS?

Answer:

"High speed" is a term that has been abused a lot, and you're right to be concerned. An ISP that doesn't update its web site much may only mean "we support v.90 56k modems", and considers them to be "high speed" (v.90 modems were fast in 1999!)

Probably though you are asking about "accelerated" dialup software.... generally it claims to be "Up to 5x" as fast as dialup on an ordinary phone line... the key words there are Up To :)

I was very skeptical about this stuff at first - about 10 years ago, AOL used similar compression and proxy cache server techniques and they didn't work well at all.

However, the feedback I'm getting in 2004 is these products are pretty good - as long as you understand what it can and can't do.

It can speed up graphics heavy pages that people visit a lot - because it doesn't have to go fetch everything again (it uses stored copies) and it compresses the graphics to take a lot of size out of them. These days, web site designers often forget about dialup users and use large bloated graphics.

If you visit mostly pages that few people visit, it probably won't help a whole lot - but it should still show some improvement.

What acceleration can't do is change the laws of physics. If you spend time online downloading MP3s or ZIP files, you will so no benefit at all from the acceleration. High Speed dialup is NOT "as fast as DSL" as some ISPs claimed (SBC took one ISP making that claim to court and SBC won the case...)

Accelerated internet also generally doesn't speed up internet access that isn't using "the web" (ie playing online games like Quake)

Propel and Slipstream are the biggest sellers of this technology, and both seem to have a good reputation. Other products probably require a bit more research or a guarantee from the ISP to refund the charge if you can't get it working or don't like how it works. A few ISPs offer the accelerated dialup for free (TOAST.net and Earthlink come to mind)