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From...
Researchers give AOL good marks for speed
AOL and BellSouth offer fastest downloads, says ISP study.
January 28, 1999
Web posted at: 1:27 p.m. EST (1827 GMT)
by Paul Heltzel
(IDG) -- America Online: fastest draw on the Net. Who would have guessed?
But AOL is the way to go for speedy Web page downloads, according to a recent study by Inverse Network Technology.
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Contrary to conventional wisdom, Inverse finds AOL's average page download time is an industry-leading 27.64 seconds--about 3 seconds faster than second-place BellSouth, with a time of 30.43 seconds.
Inverse tested 28 Internet service providers, including Bell Atlantic-North, MindSpring, Pacific Bell Internet Services, and Sprint. The company's benchmark averages the number of seconds it takes to download pages from popular sites such as www.yahoo.com, www.schwab.com, and www.mtv.com. Inverse runs the tests using consumer PCs and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4 over a 33.6-kilobits-per-second modem.
The average throughput for the ISPs tested was 2.79 kbps. AOL scored just a bit better, with an average throughput of 2.83 kbps. Inverse says AOL, while hardly besting the throughput average, provides the best page-loading performance due to the service's use of compression and caching technologies.
Users saw slightly more connection failures in the last part of 1998, according to the report. Inverse attributes the holdups to increased online use during the holidays. Shoppers went online in a big way this season for the first time, slowing Net traffic.