Beaver Island Michigan

Grand ISP offers accelerated dial-up internet- up to 5x faster than standard dial-up for $7.95 per month for Beaver Island residents. Local Charlevoix number. This is a basic internet service with no in-home support offered, but toll free tech support is offered. Call 888-882-5702 for more info.

Local Charlevoix number.

Thus long distance for anyone on Beaver Island? Sounds pretty darn expensive.

(Hopefully we'll have real broadband on-island though with Brian Tort actively working on it as we write this )

The way these ISP's work is to cache locally (on their servers) many of the commonly visited web pages (e.g. Yahoo mail's login page) so they can deliver them to their customers without the typical extended network delays (which would also affect a true high-speed ISP). So they're not really delivering most of the web to you 5x faster ... they're delivering highly select portions of the web "up to" 5x faster. You can get some of the same speed effect by increasing your browser cache size and the length of time you retain web data ... and doing so will cost you nothing. And yes, Charlevoix is a toll call for most Islanders. I'm with Jeff: wait for real high-speed service.

You can get some of the same speed effect by increasing your browser cache size and the length of time you retain web data ... and doing so will cost you nothing. And yes, Charlevoix is a toll call for most Islanders. I'm with Jeff: wait for real high-speed service.

Increasing your browser cache size and lengthening the "clear it" time works for anyone more fluent witn operating and maintaining their computer. For those who aren't as fluent with how the cache works, and don't do regular spyware scans, BE CAREFUL!
The browser cache is a known hiding spot for many virus and spyware. The longer you leave these little nasties on your system, the longer they have a chance to do their stuff. Plus, a larger cache size means, more of them can hide there, for longer. The popular Anti-virus programs are no longer "good enough" to protect your system. I'm constantly cleaning hundreds of spyware and trojan/worm virus from people's systems that had Norton and/or McAfee installed. Both of these are set for optimum spyware and virus scanning. The scanning levels were so high that you could barely use the system. Then I do my scans and find hundreds of spyware and several virus on the same system.
I still recommend using a virus program, but you need to do manual scans with it on a regular basis, the auto-blocking features no longer meet the challenge.
You should also get Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D, and do manual scans with these as well. They're free, search on Google and you will find where to download them.
As for high-speed internet, I am with Jeff also; I'll wait for the "real thing".

A bit of a late followup, but I remember when transworld first took over for GLE they sent an email about their powerup accelerator: http://www.powerc.net/default.aspx?page=powerup

It delivers the most for those who don't mind images being reduced in quality and with more jpeg artifacts through aggressive re-compression, but it also compresses the actual html on sites that aren't already using mod_gzip, mod_deflate, etc. to do this while serving. Dialup+the accelerator is still dialup, but it can be somewhat useful. Gave it a spin last week for fun:

Thanks Jeff for your reply. Grand ISP uses the Propel Accelerator which does compress graphics and html. The accelerator has 4 different user selected settings, depending on how much compression you desire. You can find out more at www.propel.com