Speeding Up the Internet
Over the couple of weeks, I've been trying very hard to improve the speed of our internet connections at La Maison des Fleurs.
When we lived at Rue St. Nicolas in Josselin (and when I lived at Les Croix), we had 2Mbs internet access. Now we only have 512Kbs (about a quarter of what we had before.)
To see any of the images at a higher resolution, just click on the image. To close the larger image, click on the X in the top right-hand corner.
We suffer (or, at least, used to) from intermittent failues and general slowness.
Well, being a techy sort of person, I decided that that wasn't good enough so I have built a PC to act as a caching DNS and HTTP Object server (with content filtering and HTML prefetching.)
Don't worry, I am not going to try and explain all that here but, if you are interested, you might want to pop over and take a look at the websites that I have built to detail it all.
There are two websites... www.InternetAccelerationAppliance.com for the main site and...
www.iaafiles.com for the really techinical stuff and the files that are needed, should you wish to try and build one yourself.
The main site has a helpdesk/support forum for registered users and I'm hoping that my soluton to slow internet may have some use throught Brittany (or, indeed, throughout France.)
Come to think about it, there are many places in the world that don't have a great IT infrastructure - this solution could be as equally useful to a charity working in Africa (for example), trying to order new stocks of medicine, as it is to me trying to get on to BBC Sport to see how badly Spurs have lost again!
For people who don't want to go to the hassle of building one of these machines themselves, I am happy to build one and install it anywhere in Brittany. I can also ship ready built machines to any address in France.
There are full product details (and prices) on the site.
Although the system doesn't make any difference to the underlying speed of your ADSL connection (or modem connection, if you are unlucky enough to be outside the ADSL catchment area), it does reduce the amount of work that the ADSL line has to do by keeping local copies of IP Address, graphics, webpages etc.
It also filters out advertising, which speeds up the display of your webpages all by itself.
Speaking just for myself, I find the internet is much snappier now, and I can continue working even whilst downloading at the same time.
Of course, I lust after a 10Mbs connection but, if that meant having to move to a city (or worse, go back to London), then I'll put up with what I've got!
All the best....
Keith
P.S. A whole post and I've only mentioned Spurs once (well.... twice now, I suppose!)
