Before you think about jumping ship from your current ISP (Internet Service Provider) and going with another one that offers faster connection speeds, be aware of one thing: The speeds you ultimately get still depends on the quality of the lines you have in your business or home, and your equipment itself!

Dial up companies like to say that they can offer speeds as fast as DSL or cable. This isn’t exactly true. What happens is they cache commonly requested pages on their servers and simply refresh the cache on request. So when you go to google or a similar site you aren’t actually seeing the site itself – you are seeing a cached version of the page from your ISP’s servers.

For some this may not be a big deal at all. Who cares what version of the page it is, after all? And to tell you the truth your computer does this too without you knowing. When it requests a web page it downloads and stores locally all the files it needs to render the page. So graphics, scripts, and the text are often stored locally for quick access the next time you go to that site.

Be aware too that your hardware, especially dial up hardware, is limited to v.90 or v.92 speeds. This means that the modem card in your computer can actually only receive, process, and transmit a limited amount of data in a specific time.