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Warning: This article became longer than intended. This is a very complex issue and to fully understand my underlying point, a certain amount of background has to come along with it. I hope that it is deemed worth the read. If you're in a hurry, read the intro and then skip to your connection type to find out how you might ACTUALLY improve your connection!

I chose to respond to this article to clear up a very common misconception. How can you speed up your internet connection? You can't. Period. You subscribe to a set service package or technology which grants a standard rate cap. This will hold as your maximum throughput regardless of software, lucky charms, prayers to the heavens, or any other scheme being sold. There are many companies out there who offer products claiming to do something that flat out is not physically possible. Their misinformation dupes those who don't fully understand the technologies they sit behind into needlessly paying for something that is entirely useless. Some of them even bundle enough spyware and background tracking/advertising applications that they actually reduce total available bandwidth (read: 'slow you down').
Basically, the way a web/internet/bandwidth-acceler ator works is utilizing compression/decompression, caching, or a combination of the two. They are almost entirely geared towards web surfing. What happens is this: You type in the URL of the web page you want to go to. Instead of your browser directly requesting the page from its source, you are instead directed to your software's cache server. The cache server (hopefully) checks its latest cached sample of the page against the hosted page. If there is not a newer version, it begins sending you the page it already has cached and compressed. Two problems here: 1) you may or may not be getting the 'latest' content on the page 2) compression = quality loss. I will leave you to your own research (or a future article?) on compression, but for now just understand it equates to loss in quality for things such as images on a webpage. Why does this seem faster? If the page is already cached, you dont have to go out and get it from its actual source. Without a lot of detail, yes this saves time at the expense of possibly not having the most up-to-date material. Compression/decompression lets them transmit to you -nearly- the same image from a site, just shrunk down a bit in size resulting in a slight loss in quality.
The bottom line- these applications do not

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